For two decades, the internet was organized around one behavior. The click.

SEO was the playbook. Rank high, get clicked, measure conversions, repeat. Every marketer understood the game because the incentives were visible. Clicks, impressions, sessions.  If you wanted, you could even pay for clicks!

Then, something changed.

People stopped clicking. They started asking.

“What’s the best CRM for startups?”

“Explain Bitcoin like I’m five.”

“Which project management tool actually works?”

And the answers no longer live on your website. They live inside the model.

These are what some marketers call “click-less interactions”. The invisible layer of discovery happening inside LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.

No impressions. No referral traffic. No analytics. Just your brand, either being mentioned or not.

This isn’t just a threat to bottom-of-funnel queries like “buy” or “compare.”  It’s creeping into awareness, too.

People are asking LLMs to help them learn, explore, and form opinions.

They’re not just searching for what to buy. They’re searching for what to believe.

When someone asks, “Who’s doing something interesting in clean beauty?” or “What’s an underrated SaaS brand worth watching?”  that’s no longer a Google query. It’s an AI conversation.

Which means LLMs aren’t just redistributing clicks. They’re reallocating trust.

In traditional SEO, you optimized for the algorithm’s ranking logic. In the LLM era, you’re optimizing for the model’s understanding of your brand.

When a model explains your category, who appears in the answer? How are they described? Do you sound credible, or forgettable?

That’s the new organic battlefield. It’s not about ranking in a list. It's about being confidently woven into the story the model tells.

You don’t need to win the click anymore. You need to win the memory.

Google sits at the center of this paradox.

They invented the Transformer, the very technology enabling this shift, but their empire still runs on clicks and ad placements.

Now they’re forced to balance two incompatible truths: AI summaries make search better for users, but worse for business.

So they’ve started integrating AI Overviews and AI Mode, even though those same overviews cut into their own traffic.

Google will survive. But for the first time in decades, they’re having to completely rethink their golden goose..

Not every brand will feel this equally.

At the top of the risk spectrum are review and affiliate sites, whose entire business model is being summarized away.

Next are content aggregators and listicle publishers, who provide information that LLMs can synthesize faster and better.

At the lower end are brands with original IP, unique perspectives, or cultural momentum.  These are the ones that give the model something new to say.

LLMs crave trustworthy, differentiated signals. They need to know who to trust when generating answers.

If your brand creates ideas, data, or stories, you’ll appear. If your brand merely recycles what already exists, you’ll fade into the background.

The web used to reward visibility. Now it rewards clarity.

Google built the Transformer. The Transformer is now rebuilding the web.

SEO helped brands get seen. LLM optimization helps them get remembered.

The question isn’t “How do I rank?” anymore. It’s “How do I make sure the machines remember me?”

We’ve started running LLM visibility audits.  Checking what ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini actually say about your brand and category.

If you’d like to see what the models already “know” about you, reply or reach out.