Most firms are about to learn what AI search does to traffic. We learned it from the inside, defending a marketplace with tens of millions of annual visits as Google's AI Overviews started answering the questions that used to send people to it.
The work was not glamorous. Eight homepages, 192 sub-homes and 1,500 SEO pages, restructured Pareto-first: protect the high-intent pages an AI answer can summarise away before the clicks go. On a smaller brand the same discipline drove a 150% revenue lift in three months.
Being indexed is not the same as being cited.
The lesson, in one line: the visibility you treat as solved is the visibility most exposed. The firms that win the next decade are measuring their share of answers now, while it is still cheap to move.