Think about the last time you looked something up online. Did you scroll through a page of blue links and click one, or did you read the answer sitting right there at the top of the results and move on with your day? For most of us, and increasingly for our customers, it is the second one. Search has quietly stopped being a directory that sends you somewhere and started becoming the destination itself.
The numbers behind that shift are now hard to ignore. In an analysis of United States clickstream data published on 9 June, Rand Fishkin of SparkToro found that 68 percent of Google searches in the first four months of 2026 ended without a single click to the open web. Two years earlier that figure was 60 percent. It is the fastest jump in a decade, and Google’s own AI Overviews are the main reason. Those AI-written summaries now sit on top of more than a fifth of searches, and when they appear they cut the click-through rate to the pages below by close to 60 percent.
For a New Zealand business, that lands somewhere uncomfortable. Most company websites were built around a simple bargain. You publish useful pages, Google ranks them, and people click through to read more, ring you or buy something. That bargain is being rewritten in real time. The search engine increasingly reads your page, keeps the useful part and hands the answer straight to the customer without ever sending them to you.
The mirror image of that story is more hopeful, and it is where I would spend my attention if I ran a business right now. People are not only reading answers inside Google. They are asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude directly, and a small but fast-growing share of them are following a link out to a real website afterwards. Conductor’s 2026 benchmark, updated on 6 July, puts AI referral traffic at only about 1 percent of all website visits today, but it is climbing roughly 1 percent month on month, and ChatGPT alone accounts for close to nine in every ten of those visits.
One percent sounds trivial until you look at who is arriving. Adobe’s mid-June traffic report, drawn from more than a trillion visits to North American retail sites, found that traffic referred by AI assistants more than doubled in the year to May and converted 42 percent better than ordinary traffic. Those visitors stayed longer and looked at more pages. The reason is intuitive. Someone who has spent five minutes talking a problem through with an assistant and then clicks your link is not idly browsing. They have already done their research and turned up ready to act. That figure is vendor-stated rather than independently audited, so treat the precise number with a little caution, but the direction of travel is consistent everywhere you look.
None of this is theoretical here. Deloitte research commissioned by 2degrees and published in April found that 82 percent of New Zealand businesses now use AI in some form. What that statistic quietly tells you is that the same tools are in the hands of your customers. The tradie deciding which plumber to call, the office manager choosing a supplier, the family picking a holiday park, more of them are opening an assistant and asking before they open a browser tab. The question every owner should be asking is not whether they use AI inside the business. It is whether AI knows the business exists.
The uncomfortable truth is that a lot of the old search advice still holds. It just matters more now. Language models and AI Overviews are built on top of the same crawlers that index the web, so a site that is slow, badly structured or invisible to Google is invisible to them as well. The fundamentals have not changed. Your pages need to load quickly, describe plainly what you do and where you do it, and be readable by a machine as easily as by a person. If anything, the technical housekeeping that used to be a nice-to-have is now simply the price of entry.
What has changed is what gets rewarded on top of that. Assistants and AI summaries favour content that answers a question cleanly and can be quoted without ambiguity. A page that states, in plain words, what a service costs, who it is for, how long it takes and what the alternatives are is far more likely to be lifted into an answer than a wall of marketing copy that dances around the point. I have started telling clients to write the way they would speak to a customer across a counter, because that is much closer to how an assistant reads a page than any keyword-stuffing trick ever was.
Two other things matter more than they used to. The first is being talked about somewhere other than your own website. Assistants weigh outside signals heavily, so genuine reviews, a tidy Google Business profile, a mention in a trade directory or a piece of local news coverage all feed the picture the model builds of you. The second is not hiding your best information behind a form or a login. If the useful answer only exists in a brochure the customer has to request, no assistant will ever find it, and increasingly neither will the customer.
I would add one caution against overcorrecting. The click is diminished but it is not dead, and traditional search still drives the overwhelming majority of website visits for most New Zealand businesses. This is not a reason to tear up your site and chase the newest three-letter acronym. It is a reason to make sure the site you already have is fast, honest and quotable, and to start watching your own analytics for the trickle of visitors now arriving from AI tools, so you can see the shift happening in your own numbers rather than in somebody else’s report.
The businesses that came through the last great search shift, the arrival of the smartphone, were not the ones who panicked. They were the ones who quietly made sure they worked well on the device people had actually started using. This is the same moment wearing different clothes. Your customers have changed how they look for answers. The job now is to make sure that when they ask, the answer includes you.
Roger McSaveney is General Manager of Forge Creative, an Auckland web design and development agency.
What is your business seeing in its website traffic this year? Have AI tools started sending you customers, or quietly taking them away? Share your experience in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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