Every few weeks someone tells me PPC is dying.
This time it’s AI Overviews. Google now answers the question before anyone clicks anything, and suddenly half the industry is convinced paid search is finished.
I’ve heard this before. Voice search was supposed to kill keywords. Zero-click searches were supposed to kill organic. Search has a habit of dying roughly every eighteen months and somehow it’s still here, still taking budget, still doing the job.
So let’s look at what’s actually happening.
The clicks going missing were never the valuable ones
AI Overviews absorb informational queries. Someone searches “how does digital marketing work” and gets a solid answer without clicking anything. No visit, no session, no attribution.
That’s top-of-funnel (TOFU) traffic, and it’s the bit AI Overviews were always going to eat first. But here’s the thing, were those ever your customers? The person who searched “how does a coffee machine work” was doing research. Maybe they’d convert in six weeks. Maybe never. If you were spending PPC budget chasing TOFU clicks, that’s the real problem, and AI Overviews didn’t create it.
The queries that actually matter,”PPC agency Newcastle,” “office chairs under £300,” “emergency electrician Newcastle” sit further down the funnel and don’t get swallowed by a summary. Nobody wants an AI paragraph when they’re ready to hire someone or looking to buy something. They want a business. They want to act.
That traffic isn’t going anywhere.
The clicks that survive are worth more
This is the part that gets missed in most of the doom posting: the users clicking through to your site now arrive further along than they used to.
The easy research phase, the TOFU stuff, has been handled elsewhere. They’ve already got the background. By the time they’re clicking your ad, they’re not browsing, they’re simply deciding. That’s a warmer lead than the person who turned up eighteen months ago still figuring out what they even needed or wanted.
So yes, volume is down. But the clicks left standing are Middle-of-funnel (MOFU) and (bottom-of-funnel) BOFU by nature, the ones who were always going to spend money. Less noise, more signals. Most advertisers should be happy with that trade, even if the dashboard doesn’t make it look that way at first.
Brand is doing more work than it used to
There’s something happening quietly in the background that’s worth paying attention to.
If users are getting more of their early research answered by AI, on the results page, without visiting your site, there are fewer chances for your brand to get in front of them during that TOFU stage. So when it comes to actually clicking an ad further down the funnel, familiarity does more of the deciding than it used to.
Two similar ads, one brand they recognise, one they don’t. Most people click the familiar one.
That’s not a problem PPC can fix on its own. It’s an argument for taking Paid Social seriously as part of the same system, not a separate budget line doing a separate job. The awareness it builds at the top of the funnel is quietly propping up your search performance further down it, even when the attribution never shows it.
Fewer clicks doesn’t mean less competition
The assumption doing the rounds is that AI will shrink PPC. I think it does the opposite.
If AI filters out the low-intent TOFU traffic and leaves a smaller pool of MOFU and BOFU users who are genuinely ready to act, advertisers end up fighting over something more valuable. More competition, not less. CPCs on your best commercial terms are more likely to hold or climb than to fall.
Which means the question isn’t “how do I get more clicks.” It’s “how do I get more out of the ones I’ve already got.” Landing page quality, offer clarity, what happens after the click, those have always mattered. They matter more now that most of what lands is MOFU or BOFU.
What to actually do about it
Pull back spend on keywords that were always TOFU and informational. If the intent was never commercial, the AI Overview has just saved you the wasted clicks.
Shift the weighting in your funnel thinking. TOFU still matters for brand and for the queries AI hasn’t fully absorbed yet, but MOFU and BOFU deserve a bigger share of budget and attention than they got eighteen months ago, because that’s where the surviving clicks actually sit.
Tighten the gap between your ad and your landing page. Users arriving now are warm, they don’t need educating, they need convincing. A landing page that treats a MOFU or BOFU visitor like a cold TOFU lead is a wasted opportunity.
Sort your conversion tracking. With fewer passive research visits happening on-site, every attributed click counts more and the algorithm bidding on your behalf is only as good as the data you’re feeding it.
And stop treating Paid Social like it’s someone else’s problem. What it does for brand awareness at the top of the funnel pays dividends further down in paid search, even when you can’t draw the line between them.
So, is PPC dying?
No. It’s just getting harder to do badly.
AI Overviews are changing search. They’re taking the TOFU clicks that were unlikely to become customers anyway and leaving behind the MOFU and BOFU ones that matter. The advertisers who’ll feel it most are those who relied on high traffic to make up for a weak strategy.
That’s been true for a while. AI just makes it more obvious.
Words by: Amy Rowell
Amy Rowell is a Paid Media Manager here at SQUIDGY, specialising in paid search and online advertising. Amy shares insights on campaign management, audience targeting and maximising return on ad spend.
