The Death of Search

It was just over 1 year ago when Guy Kawasaki asked the Santa Cruz Works audience to raise their hands if they were still using Google Search. There was a deafening silence of raised hands. And then he asked how many use ChatGPT instead of search, and more than 200 hands were raised. Event: Remarkable AI

That moment, half a joke and half a reckoning, captured something profound. We are living through the first real disruption to the search paradigm in two decades. For years, SEO was the game: optimize keywords, build backlinks, structure pages so the Google crawler understood them. It was part science, part dark art. And then, seemingly overnight, the ground shifted.

The death of search—or its mutation

The numbers tell the story. Over the past year, Google’s global market share slipped below 90% for the first time in a decade. Referral traffic to publishers dropped 15% or more. Zero-click searches—where users see an AI-generated answer and never leave the search page—spiked. News organizations saw billions in traffic evaporate.

But here’s the important thing: users aren’t searching less. They’re searching differently. They’re asking questions of models, not indexes. And when you ask ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude, you don’t get ten blue links. You get an answer. That’s the new interface for knowledge.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): the new arms race

If search is mutating, so too must strategy. Traditional SEO assumes human eyes scanning a results page. But AI assistants “read” differently: they parse structured data, they value clarity, authority, and freshness in ways that echo, but don’t mimic, Google’s algorithms.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the emerging discipline for this world. It’s about ensuring your brand, your business, your narrative is present when AI answers. That means feeding trust signals—citations, schema markup, credible PR—into the bloodstream of the web so that AI models surface your content, not a competitor’s. Read: Why Your Business Can’t Ignore GEO

The stakes are existential. In a world where 200 people in a room raise their hands for ChatGPT and not Google, if you’re not GEO-ready, you may be invisible.

Cloudflare and the fight over content

This is why Matthew Prince at Cloudflare talks about “Content Independence Day.” By default, their servers now block AI crawlers unless publishers opt in, and they’re experimenting with pay-per-crawl systems. The logic is simple: content is the raw material of these models. If publishers die, the models starve. The ecosystem needs compensation.

Prince sketches three futures: content collapse, AI companies owning content outright, or a sustainable model where publishers are paid. The third, he argues, is most likely—and most necessary. But the path there runs through experiments like Cloudflare’s, through negotiations over licensing, through pressure from publishers whose traffic is bleeding away.

Automating the frontlines of engagement

And while the top of the funnel is being restructured by GEO and AI overviews, the sales function itself is being remade. Santa Cruz-based Tuul Technologies is one example: using AI agents to handle prospecting, qualification, and even early customer engagement. Instead of armies of BDRs dialing phones, companies deploy AI that speaks in their voice, at scale, instantly.

It’s all of a piece: the interface for how we find, surface, and engage with information is shifting from human-curated to AI-mediated. The decline of search is the story we notice, but the rise of generative engines—both in discovery and in commerce—is the story that matters.

The pivot point

So, where does this leave us? With a paradox. Never has content mattered more—because AI engines need it. Yet never has content felt more precarious—because the traffic and dollars that sustained it are draining away. The winners will be those who embrace GEO, demand compensation, and rethink engagement itself.

The silence when Guy Kawasaki asked about Google was telling. The raised hands for ChatGPT were louder. We are at the pivot point.