News executives anticipate that search referrals will fall by more than 40% over the next three years as search engines increasingly turn into AI-powered answer engines, according to a new report from the Reuters Institute. This transformation is cutting into publisher traffic and speeding the shift away from traditional SEO toward AEO and GEO. Why we care. Google’s AI Overviews and conversational, chatbot-style search are reshaping how users access information, often without visiting publisher sites. Longstanding SEO visibility, attribution, and ROI frameworks are rapidly becoming obsolete. What’s happening. Publishers foresee search traffic nearly being cut in half. Survey participants predict a 43% decline in search engine traffic within three years, with about 20% expecting drops of more than 75%. Google referrals are already shrinking. Chartbeat data cited in the report shows global organic Google search traffic down 33% between November 2024 and November 2025, and down 38% in the U.S. over the same timeframe. AI Overviews are a key driver. Google’s AI Overviews appear at the top of roughly 10% of U.S. search results, and studies indicate they correlate with higher zero-click behavior, the report notes. The effects are uneven. Lifestyle and utility content (such as weather, TV listings, and horoscopes) seems most vulnerable, while hard news queries have, so far, been relatively protected. SEO to AEO and GEO. The Reuters Institute projects fast expansion of answer engine optimization (AEO) and generative engine optimization (GEO) as publishers and agencies adjust to AI-first search experiences. AEO and GEO offerings are poised to grow quickly, with agencies retooling and extending their SEO playbooks…