Photo by Alina Grubnyak on Unsplash of the Art Installation by Tomás Saraceno, Algo-r(h)i(y)thms, 2018, Palais de Tokyo.

New here? Jerk is a physics term — the rate of change of acceleration. I read business signals through four derivatives so you can see what's shifting before it shows up in the numbers.

If you’ve talked to me lately, I’ve been a bit evangelical about AEO.   

You've probably been feeling it. Ad costs up, leads thinner, the website that used to bring people in now bringing fewer. Nothing on your end changed. The work is the same. The results aren't.

Here's why.

For fifteen years, ranking on Google and getting the visit were the same skill. Top of the page meant traffic. Traffic meant leads. Leads meant pipeline.

That relationship is over.

Not weakened. Decoupled.

And most owners are still optimizing for the half that no longer pays.

For example, HubSpot lost 70 to 80% of its organic traffic in two quarters.

Their rankings didn't move.

The clicks just stopped coming.

If we read the JERK Signals:

Position — where the field stands right now.

AI Overviews appear above the organic results. On a laptop, they fill the screen. On a phone, they more than fill the screen.

60% of Google searches now end without a click. Inside Google's AI Mode, that number is 93%.

The page is still indexed. The ranking is still there. The visitor isn't.

Velocity — the direction this is moving.

Pew Research measured click-through dropping 46.7% when an AI summary appeared on a query. Seer Interactive put it at 61% for informational queries.

These aren't predictions. They're measurements.

The velocity is one-way. Once a category of query is being answered above the fold, the clicks don't come back.

Acceleration — the rate is itself increasing.

Small publishers — sites with 1,000 to 10,000 daily page views — lost 60% of their referral traffic in two years.

Medium publishers lost 47%. Large publishers, 22%.

The smaller you are, the steeper your curve. Three to one, hitting the smallest the hardest.

Every small business with a website is a small publisher in this math. The pattern follows size, not industry.

Jerk — the relationship itself is changing.

This is the signal most readers haven't seen yet.

In mid-2025, if you ranked in Google's top ten, there was a 75% chance you'd also be cited in the AI answer. The two moved together. Optimize for one, get the other.

By early 2026 — nine months later — that overlap had collapsed to between 17 and 38%.

Ranking and being cited didn't just drift apart. They came apart.

That's jerk. Not the change itself. The change in how the changes relate to each other.

The agreement that ranking earned you visibility — the thing the SEO industry has been selling for years — was always an agreement, not a law. It is dissolving rapidly.

Ranking still happens. Citation still happens. They're two different games now, on two different scoreboards.

They're also still connected. The AI tools draw from indexed pages. If your site has nothing for Google to crawl, ChatGPT has nothing to cite. SEO is the foundation. AEO is the layer on top.

The mistake isn't doing SEO. The mistake is doing only SEO.

A practitioner's note.

I've been reading these signals for clients since the AI overviews started shipping.

Here's what the data doesn't quite show.

The businesses losing the most aren't the ones with bad SEO. They're the ones with the best SEO. Years of investment. Top-three positions on their best queries. And their traffic dropped the fastest — because their queries were exactly the ones the AI summaries answered first.

Being good at the old game is now a risk factor.

Being only good at the old game, that is. The foundation still matters. The roof on top of it is what most owners are missing.

The owners who are quietly winning shifted attention to a different question. Not how do I rank? but what is my customer actually asking the AI, and is my answer the one that gets passed along?

The questions are sitting there in plain language. You can find them in thirty minutes.

Most owners haven't looked.

Here's the marker for how fast this is moving. Last fall, HubSpot quietly acquired a ten-month-old startup that tracks how brands show up in AI answers. Five months later, in April, they launched the integrated product. They named it the same thing the rest of us have been calling it: AEO. Answer Engine Optimization.

When the company that lost the most is buying the tools and selling them back to the market in under six months, the shift is no longer leading-edge. It's table stakes.

The five-minute practice this week.

Open ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini.

Ask it, in plain English, what one of your customers would ask: "What's a good [your category] in [your area]?" or "How do I choose a [your service]?"

Read the answer.

Notice three things.

One. Are you in it?

Two. If you're not, who is? What do they have on their site that you don't?

Three. What did the AI get almost right about your category — close but not quite? That gap is the page you haven't written yet.

That's your baseline reading. Run it again in 30 days. You'll see your own velocity.

OR

Walk through this process and far more when you sign up for the AEO Workshop 21 May Noon-2pm EDT.

The through-line.

The rankings are still there. The clicks are gone.

The two were never the same thing. They were an agreement that happened to hold for years.

Optimizing harder for the old game won't carry you across. It will deepen the gap.

The work isn't only SEO anymore. The work is reading what's actually being asked, and being the answer.

A calmer way to see what's coming.

Or more succinctly, as Matt Maginley, former Ogilvy and current AEO working group member said a few months ago as we looked at the data, “The funnel is dead.”  

The workshop is May 21, noon to 2pm ET. We'll do this for your specific category.

Sources Listed in the order they appear.

• HubSpot organic traffic loss (70–80%). CEO Yamini Rangan acknowledged the decline on HubSpot's Q1 2025 earnings call, attributing it to AI Overviews. demandlocal.com/blog/ai-search-organic-traffic-decline-agencies

• Zero-click rate on Google Search (60%). Bain & Company, February 2025, confirmed by subsequent studies through 2026.

• Zero-click rate inside Google AI Mode (93%). Semrush, September 2025. Based on analysis of approximately 69 million Google Search sessions, May–July 2025. semrush.com/blog/google-ai-mode-seo-impact

• Click-through drop when AI summaries appear (46.7%). Pew Research Center, July 2025. Based on 68,000 real searches from 900 U.S. adults.

• Click-through drop on AI Overview queries (61%). Seer Interactive, September 2025.

• Small publisher traffic decline (60% over two years). Chartbeat data reported by Axios, March 17, 2026. axios.com/2026/03/17/chartbeat-search-traffic-ai-chatbots

• Top-10 ranking and AI Overview citation overlap (75% → 17–38%). Cited by Mersel AI, March 2026, comparing mid-2025 to early 2026 figures. mersel.ai/blog/why-organic-traffic-declining-2026

• HubSpot AEO product launch. April 14, 2026, built on HubSpot's Q4 2025 acquisition of XFunnel.ai. ppc.land/hubspot-launches-aeo-tool and contentmonk.io/blog/hubspot-aeo-review-and-alternatives