Informational demand is being satisfied before the click, and mostly inside Google itself, not only in chat tools. Pew watched the real browsing of 900 US adults: a question-shaped search pulls an AI Overview 60% of the time, a one or two word search only 8%. Where the summary appears, clicks fall from 15% to 8%. That is the informational query being absorbed, isolated by query shape. Meanwhile SparkToro's clickstream puts zero-click at 68.01% for Jan to Apr 2026, and only 0.34% of searches went to AI Mode. The loss is happening on ordinary results pages.
Profound's ChatGPT sample shows informational intent is lower in chat (32.7%) than in Google (52.7%). Navigational collapsed from 32% to 2%, transactional rose ninefold. People go to chat to get things done and to buy. So "the questions are answered before the click," not "informational search moved to LLMs," which was my initial thought.
What it requires of the website
Informational content stopped being an acquisition asset and became a supply asset. It is no longer how you catch someone early. It is what the machine reads to build the sentence it tells your buyer. Keep making it. Stop judging it by its own session numbers, because those will keep falling while the content does its job.
Where the informational keywords go
Everywhere except the first screen. Docs, comparison pages, glossary, FAQ, the pricing explainer, the integration pages. Write those in complete, self-contained statements, because what gets lifted is a passage, not a page. A sentence that only makes sense after the two above it is a sentence no model can quote.
What the main page focuses on
Stop building it to persuade and start building it to verify. Adobe's tech and software numbers say these visitors view 23% more pages and bounce 40% less. They did not come to be convinced, they came to check. A summary averages 67 words, so it gives them the category and flattens everything else. Your first screen has to supply exactly what got flattened: the price, the limit, who it is not for, one named proof.
The funnel now
The top is gone from your property. Awareness happens inside a model, out of your sight, built mostly from what other people wrote about you. Your site serves the middle and the bottom, verification and conversion, and it has a loop in it: over 20% of ChatGPT's referral traffic goes to Google, so people leave the answer to cross-check before they arrive.
In a year: forecast rather than data.
Three things.
The retrievable unit stops being the page and becomes the claim, so the highest-leverage asset becomes a set of specific, checkable statements about your product that appear in enough places to be reproduced reliably.
Pages get read twice, once by a delegate collecting facts and once by the human reading its summary, which rewards specifics and punishes atmosphere.
And attribution gets worse before it gets better, so expect direct and unassigned traffic to swell while the real work happens where nothing counts it.
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