A substantial and growing proportion of searches are answered on the results page itself. The user gets what they wanted and nobody's website is visited.
This has been building for a decade through featured snippets, knowledge panels and direct answers, and has accelerated with generative summaries. For anyone whose model depends on search traffic, it is the defining structural issue.
What is actually happening
Search engines have moved from being a directory to being an answering system.
The commercial logic is straightforward. A user who gets an answer without leaving is a user who stays in the product, sees more of its advertising, and returns more often.
The content used to construct those answers comes from websites that receive no visit in exchange.
Whether that is a fair exchange is contested, and there is active litigation and regulation in several jurisdictions. As a practical matter it is the environment, and it is not reversing.
Which queries are affected most
The pattern is fairly predictable and it determines who is hurt.
Simple factual questions with a short definitive answer are almost entirely answered on the page. Conversions, definitions, dates, opening hours, simple how-to steps.
Anything that can be summarised in a paragraph is increasingly summarised.
What survives is queries requiring depth, judgement, comparison against specific circumstances, or something the answering system cannot reproduce — a tool, a transaction, an original dataset, a genuine opinion, an ongoing relationship.
Which means the content most exposed is exactly the commodity informational content that a great many sites are built on.
What actually still earns a visit
From watching what has held up rather than from theory.
Original research and proprietary data. A summary can quote your figure and anybody who wants the methodology or the full dataset has to come to you.
Tools and calculators, which cannot be summarised because they require input.
Genuine expertise applied to a specific situation, where the answer is conditional and a general summary is unsatisfying.
Strong personal perspective. A distinctive voice is not replaceable by a synthesis of everybody's voice, and readers who want a particular writer come for that writer.
Community, in any form, which cannot be extracted at all.
And transactions, obviously, since the answer to a purchase intent is still a destination.
The strategic response
Uncomfortable and I think unavoidable.
Reduce dependence on search as a primary channel, which means building audience you reach directly — email principally, and any other owned channel.
Shift content investment away from the commodity informational material that is most exposed and toward the categories above.
Accept that some traffic is simply gone and plan a business that works without it, rather than optimising for a channel that is structurally shrinking.
None of that is quick, which is the difficulty. The transition has to be funded by the traffic that is declining.
The tactical layer
Things worth doing within the constraint, without expecting them to solve it.
Structured markup, which improves the chance of being the source cited in an answer, which produces some visibility even without a click.
Content structured so that a summary is unsatisfying — where the value is in the specifics, the caveats, the worked examples, the things a paragraph cannot carry.
Brand strength, so that people search for you rather than for the topic. A branded search is not affected by any of this, and it is the most durable position available.
And monitoring impressions rather than only clicks, because visibility without a click still has some value and measuring only clicks will make a declining channel look worse than it is.
The honest position
I do not think there is a tactical answer to a structural change, and most of the advice circulating is tactical.
The businesses that will be fine are the ones that have a reason for people to come to them specifically, which is the same thing that has always distinguished a publication from a page.
The ones in difficulty are those built on being one of many adequate answers to a common question, and that model was always vulnerable to somebody aggregating the answers. It has taken longer than it might have.
Measuring it for your own site
Worth doing rather than assuming, because exposure varies enormously by topic.
Compare impressions against clicks per query in search console data, and look at how the ratio has moved over eighteen months.
Queries where impressions hold and clicks decline are the ones being answered on the results page.
Sorting by that gap tells you exactly which parts of your content are exposed, which is a more useful basis for reallocating effort than any general commentary about the trend.
Being the cited source
Where some value remains even without a visit.
Appearing as the named source in an answer carries brand value, and for some queries it is the only visibility available.
What appears to help is clear factual statements attributable to you, original data with your name attached, and structure that makes the relevant passage easy to extract.
It is a smaller prize than a visit and it is not nothing, and for informational content that is going to be summarised regardless, being the source beats being ignored.