AI took your click. Now what.

The number everybody in search marketing is watching is the share of results that now carry a generated answer above the links, and it keeps going up. The follow-on number is that when one appears, the top link loses a large share of its clicks.

This has produced a lot of panic. Some of it is warranted. Most of it is misdirected, and which one applies to you depends entirely on what your pages are for.

Who this genuinely hurts. Sites whose business model is the informational click. If you monetize with ads on a page that explains what a heat pump is, that page is being answered above you now, and no amount of optimization restores a click that no longer happens. That is a structural change to a business model, not a ranking problem.

Who this barely touches. A plumber. The query "emergency plumber near me at 9pm" does not get answered by a paragraph. It gets answered by a phone number. Commercial local intent is where generated answers appear least, because there is nothing to summarize. The person does not want to understand plumbing.

So the first question is not what to do about it. It is which kind of page you own.

If you own the second kind, carry on, and be findable.

If you own the first kind, the realistic move is to stop optimizing for the click and start optimizing to be the source that gets cited, because cited sources do get traffic and they get it with more intent behind it. That means being specific, being current, and being the page that contains a fact nobody else has. A summary cannot summarize something it cannot find anywhere else.

It also means, uncomfortably, that a lot of content produced over the last decade was only ever worth writing because it caught a click. That content is now worth nothing, and no strategy will change that. The pages that survive are the ones that would have been worth writing anyway.