A few months ago I stopped writing new content for most of my sites. Not because the writing was bad, but because I watched the traffic curve long enough to realize I was building for a search engine that had quietly changed the deal.
If you've searched for anything practical lately, you've seen it. You type a question, and the answer is already there — the AI Overview sits at the top of the page, pulls a response out of three or four sources, and you never click through. For a lot of queries, the click was the business model. Now it's gone.
The interesting part isn't that this is happening. It's which pages it happens to.
The asymmetry
An AI Overview is very good at collapsing an answer into a paragraph. "How many tablespoons in a cup." "Difference between let and const." "Best time to visit Kyoto." These are knowledge queries — the value is in knowing something, and a model that has read the whole web can hand you the knowing without the visit. If your page's job was to be the thing that knows the thing, you're now competing against a summary of yourself, shown above you, for free.
