AI isn’t killing search. It’s growing it.
I made a version of this argument back in January, when the industry narrative was running in the other direction. Marketers were worried that their measurement framework was being ripped up. Some called AI-powered search a "death blow" to the potential for search traffic to drive web visits and sales.
But the real story is more interesting than that. A fresh round of EDO data from June 2025 through March 2026 makes the contrarian case even stronger than I expected. While the link click and the classic ad-pixel-to-site-pixel attribution model may be in true decline, consumer search signals are growing — for marketers who know what to measure.
AI search activity grew 202%, but traditional queries jumped too
From traditional organic search results to AI-powered chats, search activity is booming across the board.
Since June 2025, EDO’s research found that Google searches per household increased by an average of 17%. At the same time, Google AI Mode queries per household climbed 202%. Standalone AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity also continue to grow their share of consumer attention very rapidly (off a low base relative to regular search).
Put those trends together and it’s clear: the search pie is growing. Consumers are becoming more curious, more demanding, and more willing to ask second and third questions. Search isn’t going anywhere, it’s just changing shape.
22% fewer clicks signal fluency, not disengagement
Here’s the catch: what has declined is the act of clicking out from search.
Over the same ten-month period, the likelihood that a Google search led to an external site visit fell 22%. Inside AI chatbots, the number of site visits following a session has also dropped significantly year-over-year.
If you treat website traffic as a proxy for consumer consideration and intent, those numbers look alarming. But if you treat the search query itself as the most pure signal — which is what we’ve always argued at EDO — the picture changes entirely.
Far from a sign of disengagement, click declines signal growing AI fluency. People are learning to write better prompts, ask sharper follow-ups, and extract usable answers without visiting a third-party page. The AI is doing more of the work, and consumers are training themselves to let it. Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode are accelerating the same behavior on the open web.
As web visits collapse, the query becomes the durable signal
When it comes to ad measurement, zero-click search means that marketers need a measurement framework that reflects the new customer journey.
The old framework counted clicks as the moment when curiosity turned into intent. But the click was never the intent. It was just the visible artifact of intent. Now that the artifact is fading, you have two choices: chase a degrading signal, or measure the underlying behavior.
We’ve spent years building the second option. Every Convergent TV airing in our database is matched against the search behavior it drives — not just the downstream visits, but the moment a consumer asks Google or an AI a question that connects to a brand or product. That signal isn’t going away. If anything, the data suggests it’s getting cleaner, because more consumer consideration is now happening inside the search environment itself rather than on the brand’s website.
It’s also why we continue to draw a hard line around the kind of search data we use. Paid search clicks and “verticalized” publisher-search signals depend on the same clickthrough behavior that’s now in retreat. Organic branded search — what a consumer actually types when something is on their mind — is the durable signal. Pair it with incrementality modeling that separates ad-driven behavior from baseline, and you have a measurement approach built for the AI era, not one we left years ago.
The real question marketers should be asking
Far from killing search, AI is expanding the surfaces where consumers seek out information. Click data always offered only partial attribution, and now this approach is increasingly unusable.
Most marketers are asking the wrong question. Rather than asking How do I replace the website visit?, consider What was the website visit ever telling me, and is there a more direct way to measure that? In almost every case, the answer is yes — and it lives in the search query itself.
In the months to come, we’ll be answering the even bigger question: How do I build brand and demand in the face of this changing customer journey? And we’ll be doing it with insight into how this challenge differs across categories.
The click was the receipt. The query is the intent. Ad-driven engagement is how you measure the second one — and unlike the first signal, it's getting stronger, not weaker.