If you’re a content marketer, how will you get people to view your content if AI-powered search engines no longer direct people to your website?

That search apocalypse – known as ‘Google Zero’ – feels like a growing possibility today. It’s shifting thinking from search engine optimisation (SEO) to generative engine optimisation (GEO) instead. And it raises a lot of hard questions about your organisation’s own online presence:

• What type of content currently brings customers and prospects to your website?

• How compelling and helpful is that content?

• Is your content a one-way conversation – or does it aim to build strong and lasting relationships with your customers and prospects?

• How else – online or off – do people discover information about your company’s products and services?

• If Google Zero becomes reality, how will customers and prospects find and access your content going forward?

• And how might all this affect your organisation’s overall success?

Content marketers can find a lot of food for thought in the Columbia Journalism Review’s ‘Journalism Zero’ report, published in May 2025. The report explores what people at journalism outlets and platforms are thinking, saying and doing as their search-generated traffic drops steeply in the wake of AI features such as Google’s AI Overviews and AI-powered searches on ChatGPT, Perplexity.ai and other tools.

Those impacts will of course play out differently in B2B content marketing. Unlike journalists at news outlets, your teams aren’t looking to attract paid subscribers with the content you produce. Instead, your job is to generate awareness of and interest in the products and services that your organisation provides, to demonstrate that you offer the best solutions to prospects’ problems, and to guide them to a buying decision. But that’s harder to do if search isn’t driving people to your online content.

Despite their differences, B2B content marketers have a lot in common with newspeople, and the CJR report highlights this in many ways. Like journalists, B2B teams depend on building ‘strong, direct relationships with their audiences’. And for both, it’s clear that AI-powered search won’t be an improvement over traditional search if it doesn’t drive visitors to their content. As one respondent on the AI platform side put it: “Basically, there is no world in which [an AI platform] is successful but publishers are not.”

The growing use of AI-powered search today raises a spectre for both content marketers and journalists: disintermediation. It’s a term that the CJR describes like this:

“Put simply, this refers to the way third-party platforms can bypass news organizations, essentially cutting out the traditional intermediary between a journalist and their audience. Offering consumers condensed summaries of journalism diminishes their need to visit the original source and weakens the relationship between publisher and audience member.”

Certainly, content marketers retain an advantage over journalists here. Even if the content you create about your company’s products and services is disintermediated – ie, people aren’t reading it on your blog or LinkedIn pages or other social media account – prospects can’t simply replace your solution with an AI summary. If they have a problem that needs to be solved with your products or services, they’ll still need to come to you. And you’ll still need to create content that’s both compelling and findable to persuade prospects to come to you instead of to a competitor.

But, in addition to making prospects less likely to click links to your content, AI searches and summaries increase the risk of diluting – or, worse yet, muddling – your carefully crafted marketing messages. The CJR report states: “One of the most profound short-term issues is if Google becomes primarily driven by single-answer search – and there are good, interesting questions about whether the consumer would accept it, because the search norms are so established – but the risks of bias, the risks of disinformation, the risk of monopoly, all become much, much greater.”

The best defence against this, many respondents in the CJR report noted, is having strong direct relationships with your audiences: “Cultivating and strengthening those audience relationships is one variable they can control.”

Which brings us back to one of the questions raised at the beginning of this post: Is your content a one-way conversation – or does it aim to build strong and lasting relationships with your customers and prospects?

More than ever, how you answer that question could determine whether your organisation stays relevant, helpful and findable in the fast-evolving world of AI-powered search. (And if you depend on partner marketing, you’ll need to make sure your partners understand that too.)