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Search as a Channel
The Intent Compression Era Is Here
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What if the biggest shift in search is not where people click, but whether intent still predicts behavior at all? AI Overviews have turned the results page from a launchpad into a destination, flattening user behavior across every query type. The result: traffic can fall while brand influence stays intact, attribution gets murkier, and leaders who measure SEO by sessions alone are missing where buyer decisions actually happen now.
This episode unpacks the Intent Compression Era and why the classic funnel is collapsing inside the results page itself. You will learn why traditional intent based strategy is breaking, what it means when AI Overviews absorb attention before the click, and how to reposition search as a channel for influence, not just a traffic source.
Built for agency owners, founders, and leaders rethinking what search performance actually proves.
Welcome to this deep dive. Today we're um we're getting into something that honestly feels like the ground is shifting right under our feet.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that is not an understatement.
SPEAKER_01Right. You know, for years, we basically treated search engines like a busy transit station. People rushed through the doors, they checked the departure signs, and then immediately jumped on a train to their actual destination. Like the whole goal was getting somewhere else as fast as humanly possible.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. You wanted to leave the station.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell Yes. But almost overnight, it feels like they've uh they've replaced that bustling transit station with a very comfortable, very cozy library. Suddenly, nobody is leaving the building.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell Which is, I mean, it's incredibly unsettling if you happen to be the one waiting at the other end of those train tracks expecting visitors.
SPEAKER_01Right. You're standing on the platform with your welcome sign.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, the trains are running, but the cars are just totally empty.
SPEAKER_01And if you are, you know, looking at your marketing dashboards this month and wondering why your organic traffic is suddenly flatlining, even though your team hasn't changed a single thing about your strategy, you aren't going crazy.
SPEAKER_00No, you're really not. It's not you.
SPEAKER_01Right. You're feeling the effects of the internet's plumbing being completely rerouted. So we've synthesized a mountain of fresh research today to help you navigate this.
SPEAKER_00Some really fantastic data in here.
SPEAKER_01Oh, it's wild. We are pulling heavily from Kevin Indig's recent work at Growth Memo, including this massive analysis of over 846,000 US Google search sessions. Plus, we've got the hard data from their recent growth intelligence brief, uh, number 19.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and the mission here, our goal for this deep dive, is to give you the vocabulary and the mechanics to actually survive what we are calling the intent compression era.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell The Intent Compression Era. I love that term.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell Because, you know, this isn't just a quirky new interface that Google rolled out to look futuristic. It is a foundational structural shift that is actively making your traditional analytics look like they're just lying to you.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell Lying right to your face. So let's start with um the rubble of the old system. To understand why your executive dashboards are suddenly flashing red, we have to look at the golden rule of search engine optimization that basically held the entire industry together for 20 years.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell Right. The old reliable rule.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Ross Powell The idea that a user's intent reliably predicts their behavior. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_00It was a beautiful predictable sequence. You know, query reveal reveals intent. Intent predicts behavior, behavior predicts clicks, and clicks equal traffic. It was so clean.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell So clean. Let's break down how clean that old mental motto used to be. Like if someone typed in a specific brand name, say uh Zappos or Salesforce. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_00Right. That was a navigational search. They knew exactly where they wanted to go. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. And because of that, their behavior was lightning fast. They hit enter, click the top blue link, and they were gone in three seconds.
SPEAKER_00Yep. Out of the station.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Ross Powell But if they typed in a broad question like what is the best CRM for a small plumbing business that was an informational or a comparison search?
SPEAKER_00Aaron Ross Powell And those users were slow, they would linger, they'd scroll past the ads, click a blog post, maybe hit the back button, scroll some more, open up like three different tabs.
SPEAKER_01And the pre-AI data validates that beautifully.
SPEAKER_00Oh, perfectly. If you look at a classic traditional search session and just freeze time at the 21-second mark, only 12% of those fast navigational searchers were still on the search page.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell 12%. So the vast majority had already caught their train.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell Exactly. But compare that to local searchers people looking for, you know, coffee near me and checking maps. At that exact same 21-second mark, 32% of them were still lingering on the search page. So behavior perfectly followed intent.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell It made total sense.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01But then enter the AI overviews.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Everything changes.
SPEAKER_01These massive blocks of AI-generated text that now just drop right at the top of your search results, pushing all those traditional links way down the screen. And when you look at those 846,000 search sessions we mentioned, you see the fracture happening in real time.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell It's incredible to see it in the data.
SPEAKER_01Trevor Burrus Right. When an AI overview is present, that widespread in behavior, you know, the gap between the fast clickers and the slow scrollers, it totally collapses.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell It flattens out entirely. I mean, the numbers are just staggering. Across all five major search intents, so informational, local, navigational, transactional, and video. When an AI summary is hovering at the top of the page, between 41.9% and 48.5% of users are still on the search page after 21 seconds.
SPEAKER_01Wow. Over 40% across the board.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, they all cluster together into the exact same behavior pattern. And the average search session overall is now almost four times longer.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell Okay, let's unpack this for a second. Because if everyone is just lingering on the page longer, regardless of whether they search for a specific brand or like a broad philosophical question, why do we even care what they originally typed in?
SPEAKER_00That's the big question.
SPEAKER_01Doesn't this render the whole concept of search intent completely useless? Like if I behave the exact same way looking for a shoe brand as I do looking for a medical symptom, intent seems dead.
SPEAKER_00Well, that is the natural conclusion to jump to, right? But it's missing a really crucial nuance here. Intent isn't dead, it has just been forcefully decoupled from behavior.
SPEAKER_01Okay, decoupled. How so?
SPEAKER_00So you still absolutely need to know what problem your customer is trying to solve to create the right product or write the right content. Like intent still dictates the what, right? But it no longer dictates the how. That old sequence we talked about, query to intent to behavior to clicks. It has a massive fracture right in the middle now.
SPEAKER_01Because the search page is no longer just a distribution channel pointing you to the answer. The search page is the answer, it's the destination.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell Precisely. And we have to look at what is actually keeping them anchored to that page. And just to be clear, this isn't some uh some niche beta test for tech early adopters. Over 1.5 billion people are currently using AI overviews.
SPEAKER_01So in with a B.
SPEAKER_00Yes.
SPEAKER_01Yes.
SPEAKER_00It is a default setting for how the web searches now. But what is truly remarkable is how passive this psychological shift was for the user.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell Yeah, that's such a good point. Nobody got a pop-up asking, hey, would you like to radically change your relationship with the internet today?
SPEAKER_00No consent form to sign.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. Users were just gently guided into this new reading environment. The search engines themselves made the unilateral decision to change the product.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell And there is a real philosophy driving this across the entire industry. I mean, Microsoft outlined this perfectly a while back when they were talking about Bing.
SPEAKER_01Oh, right, the Bing blog post.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, they said the fundamental goal of a search engine has shifted. It is no longer fetch the best documents based on keywords. The new directive is fetch the best information and then synthesize it into a reliable, verifiable answer right here.
SPEAKER_01Right here on the page.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. It is an entirely different engineering challenge.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell It's basically like reading the CLIS notes of a brand right there on the search results page. Like if I'm looking for a new project management tool, I don't need to read the whole book, meaning I don't need to actually visit your company's about us page and then your features page and then your pricing page to get the gist.
SPEAKER_00Right. You don't have time for that anyway.
SPEAKER_01The AI just scraped all of that and served it to me in a neat little bulleted list. I've already done my awareness and consideration stages before I even think about clicking a single link.
SPEAKER_00Which means your marketing funnel just got flattened like a pancake. I mean, attention is shifting upward, away from your website and directly into the search engine's interface.
SPEAKER_01Validation is happening invisibly.
SPEAKER_00Yes, entirely invisibly. Traffic is no longer the entry point to the funnel. Traffic is becoming a late stage outcome. It's literally the final step a user takes after they've already been convinced by the AI.
SPEAKER_01And that is a terrifying reality for anyone who has to report numbers to a boss. Because your attribution models are suddenly completely blind to the actual decision-making process.
SPEAKER_00They're useless in this context.
SPEAKER_01Right. A customer might be completely sold on your software, entirely based on an AI's summary. They decide to buy, they type in your URL directly a week later, and your analytics dashboard gives all the credit to direct traffic.
SPEAKER_00Yep.
SPEAKER_01When in reality it worked perfectly inside a black box you can't even measure.
SPEAKER_00And let's move from the psychology of this to the hard data, because that recent growth intelligence brief perfectly quantifies this invisible journey. We are living in what is now being called the divergence economy.
SPEAKER_01The divergence economy. I love that term. It perfectly describes this massive growing gap where a brand's traditional search visibility is dropping, but their AI-mediated discovery, meaning how often the AI explicitly recommends them, is actively growing. Yeah. And the data shows this is creating an absolute bloodbath in the software as a service sector.
SPEAKER_00Bloodbath is absolutely the right word. If you look at a recent 30-day window, major sauce giants bled traditional search visibility in total lockstep.
SPEAKER_01It was crazy to see.
SPEAKER_00AWS dropped 22.7%, Oracle went down 17%, Stripe dropped 16.8%, and GitHub lost 14.2%.
SPEAKER_01In 30 days.
SPEAKER_00In a single month. That is a catastrophic loss of traditional real estate.
SPEAKER_01Here's where it gets really interesting, though. The twist is what was happening in the background. In that exact same 30-day window, their AI prompt mentions. So the frequency with which the AI was bringing up AWS or Stripe in its generated answers grew by 25 to 90 percent.
SPEAKER_00Which is insane.
SPEAKER_01So a Sauce company marketing director is probably hyperventilating, staring at a dashboard showing web traffic falling off a cliff, completely unaware that the AI is actually recommending their product more than ever before.
SPEAKER_00Right. They are losing the visible game, but they are dominating the invisible one.
SPEAKER_01Dominating it.
SPEAKER_00But and here's the catch. While Stripe and AWS are losing that direct website traffic, that traffic hasn't just evaporated into thin air, right?
SPEAKER_01Right. Someone is clicking somewhere.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. Someone else is catching it. And the undisputed winners in this divergence economy are the aggregators.
SPEAKER_01Oh man. The numbers on the aggregators are wild. Let's look at the jobs vertical, for example. Overall visibility for job searches jumped 21.2%. But it wasn't individual corporate career pages getting that boost.
SPEAKER_00No, not at all.
SPEAKER_01It was driven almost entirely by Glassdoor, which rocketed up 64.2%, and ZipRecruiter, which went up 53.5%.
SPEAKER_00Massive gains.
SPEAKER_01Or look at local search, which rose a staggering 44%. Yelp practically carried that entire vertical, adding massive amounts of raw visibility share. Trustpilot grew almost 40%. So why are the aggregators eating everyone's lunch while the original creators of the products are starving?
SPEAKER_00It really comes down to how tech giants manage liability and risk. Think about the mechanism of AI hallucinations. Okay. If a user asks Google's AI, what is the starting salary for a senior engineer at Stripe? And the AI generates a number that is wildly inaccurate, Google is on the hook for that.
SPEAKER_01Right. They look foolish, or worse, they open themselves up to corporate complaints from Stripe.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. So how do they solve that problem? They route the query.
SPEAKER_01They outsource the risk.
SPEAKER_00Bingo. For hard, comparative queries like salaries, company reviews, product comparisons. The AI gives a very broad synthesis, but for the actual validation, it aggressively points the user to the sites that aggregate thousands of opinions.
SPEAKER_01Ah, that makes so much sense.
SPEAKER_00Google doesn't want the liability of judging Stripe's workplace culture. But Glassdoor has 10,000 verified employee reviews. So the AI summary basically says, hey, here is a brief overview of Stripe, and here are three links to Glassdoor and Trustpilot to see what people actually think.
SPEAKER_01Wow. Okay, so if aggregators are capturing the comparison traffic and AI overviews are completely monopolizing the user's first impression, how does a normal brand fight back? Like if the search page is the ultimate destination now, how do you make sure your brand actually survives the visit?
SPEAKER_00You have to optimize for the user's thumb. You have to optimize for what we call the back scroll.
SPEAKER_01The back scroll, think about it like being in the serial aisle at the grocery store.
SPEAKER_00Okay, yeah.
SPEAKER_01You stand there, you visually scan 40 different colorful boxes on the shelf in a matter of seconds, taking them all in. Right. But you only circle back and physically pick up the one specific box that caught your eye. Right. It's the exact same behavior on the new search page. The user reads the AI block at the top. That's a scan. But then their thumb stocks and they scroll back down the page to find a link that validates what they just read. When my thumb stops scrolling, what actually makes my brand look credible?
SPEAKER_00Well, that is the second impression. The AI is the first impression, which frankly you largely cannot control. Right. The back scroll is the second impression, and winning that requires a totally different playbook than traditional SEO. It is no longer about keyword stuffing or writing thousand-word blog posts. It is about extremely specific technical signals that build instantaneous trust.
SPEAKER_01Let's get into the weeds on this because it's fascinating how a machine measures human trust. Let's say you are selling a physical product. You have a product detail page on your site. How do you win the back scroll?
SPEAKER_00You need rich schema markup. Schema. Yeah. Schema is essentially the invisible translation layer between your website's visual design and the search engine's database. Yeah. It tells the machine exactly what it's looking at without it having to guess. Okay. For a product page, you absolutely need schema for aggregator rating, total reviews, and stock availability. Because when the user is scrolling down after reading that AI summary, they are doing a subconscious credibility check in milliseconds.
SPEAKER_01Right. If my listing pops up and the schema allows Google to show that I have 47 reviews, but my competitor's listing right below me pulls in 2,300 reviews, I lose.
SPEAKER_00Instantly.
SPEAKER_01It doesn't matter if my meta description is an absolute poetic masterpiece. The user is clicking the link with 2,000 reviews.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. It's a brutal numbers game. And it's even more pronounced on category detail pages.
SPEAKER_01How so?
SPEAKER_00Let's say you have a page listing all the running shoes you sell. You need item list schema. This allows the search engine to pull your products into a visual carousel right there on the search results page.
SPEAKER_01All those little swipable boxes?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And carousels take up more physical real estate on the screen, which literally pushes your competitors further down.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell And the volume of items in that schema matters immensely. Like if your category page only has 12 pairs of shoes and the AI just summarized the top five features to look for in a running shoe, you look incredibly weak.
SPEAKER_00You do.
SPEAKER_01You compete terribly against a competitor's category page whose schema indicates they have 240 products. The user's brain just says, oh, this link has options, this link is comprehensive.
SPEAKER_00Yep. And this exact same psychology applies to informational content too, like blog posts, research reports, or articles. Remember, the AI has already answered the user's core question at the top of the page. Right. So if they are scrolling down to click an article, they aren't looking for the answer anymore. They are looking for authority. They want to know who said this and when did they say it.
SPEAKER_01Ah meaning the expiration date on content is getting ridiculously short. Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_00Extremely short. You need a highly visible, machine-readable date published tag. If the AI is giving advice on 2026 tax laws, an article clearly stamped 2024 is instantly skipped. Makes sense. But beyond the date, you have to prove humanness. This brings in EEET experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Right.
SPEAKER_01The Google standards.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. How does a machine verify that a human expert actually wrote an article? It looks for named author schema that connects directly to external verifiable entities, like a real LinkedIn bio.
SPEAKER_01Think about the implications of what you just said. The click is no longer driven by novelty or curiosity. Yeah. Like the era of the catchy clickbait headline is completely dead because the AI just killed the curiosity gap by giving away the punchline.
SPEAKER_00Totally dead.
SPEAKER_01The click is now driven entirely by trust after AI exposure. Your organic search listing isn't just a digital signpost point to your store anymore. It is literally part of your product's user interface.
SPEAKER_00Which brings us to the hardest reality of this entire paradigm shift.
SPEAKER_01Oh boy.
SPEAKER_00You can deploy perfect schema. You can update your publication dates every single week. You can build incredible partnerships with Glassdoor and Yelp.
SPEAKER_01But there's always a but.
SPEAKER_00If your chief financial officer is still grading your performance based on raw organic website traffic, you are fighting a losing battle.
SPEAKER_01Because the scoreboard is fundamentally broken. If you walk into a board meeting and your primary metric of success is, hey everyone, we grew top of funnel clicks by 5%, you are speaking a dead language.
SPEAKER_00Nobody cares, or they shouldn't care.
SPEAKER_01So what does this all mean for you? How do we reframe this? If you are prepping for a strategy meeting next week with stakeholders, what is the exact narrative you need to bring to your leadership?
SPEAKER_00You have to walk in and educate them on first impression risk. You need to show them the new funnel, ask the room, where is AI currently summarizing our industry category? And is our brand completely omitted from that synthesis?
SPEAKER_01Wow, that's a powerful question.
SPEAKER_00Because if you aren't in the AI overview, you don't even exist in the awareness phase anymore.
SPEAKER_01You essentially have to treat AI prompts with the same defensive urgency as paid search. Like, we spend thousands of dollars bidding on our own brand names in Google ads just so competitors don't steal our real estate. We have to monitor our AI prompt dimensions with that exact same intensity.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. The executive level questions must shift. You cannot ask, how do we grow organic traffic? Right. The question is how do we maintain market influence when an AI is absorbing all the first attention? Right. The bottom line is this if your leadership team rigidly believe that declining web traffic automatically equals declining business value, you don't actually have an SEO problem. You have a massive internal education problem.
SPEAKER_01You have to teach them that search is now a channel of influence, not just a traffic turnstile. You are optimizing to win a decision that is happening entirely inside someone else's platform.
SPEAKER_00It requires a total surrender of control over the user journey.
SPEAKER_01And that is a massive psychological leap for marketers. We like control. But you know, throughout this entire deep dive, we've been talking about these AI overviews as if they are a static piece of brand theater. Someone searches a term, the AI generates a neat little summary, and everyone sees roughly the same play on the stage. But before we sign off, I want to leave you with a thought that really stretches this concept to its breaking point.
SPEAKER_00Oh, this is where it gets truly wild.
SPEAKER_01What happens when these AI overviews shift from being general summaries to hyper-personalized, dynamically generated answers based on a user's past behavior, their private data, their purchasing history, and their specific technical literacy.
SPEAKER_00The search engine ceases to be a library and becomes a custom-built psychological mirror.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. The second impression we just spent 10 minutes talking about, those reviews, those carousels, those author bios, you're working so hard to optimize might look entirely different for two people sitting in the exact same room searching the exact same keyword at the exact same time.
SPEAKER_00100%.
SPEAKER_01One person might get a highly technical AI overview that links to your white papers, while the other gets a simplified summary that links to your Glassdoor reviews. So the question I want you to mull over on your commute or bring to your next team huddle is this. How do you build a marketing strategy for a funnel that constantly morphs to fit the shape of every individual user? How do you optimize for a moving target?
SPEAKER_00It's a completely new frontier.
SPEAKER_01It really is. It's a lot to process, but understanding the mechanics of the intent compression era is the only way to survive it. Thank you so much for joining us on this deep dive. We hope you are walking away with a few major aha moments and, you know, a lot of ammunition for your next strategy meeting. Keep asking the hard questions, and we'll see you next time.