Almost everything you were taught about getting found online has changed in the last two years. Not softened. Changed.
If your enquiries have gone quiet and you can’t work out why, this is probably part of the answer. Here’s what’s actually happened, and what to do about it.
People still search. They’ve stopped clicking.
This is the shift that matters most, and it gets described badly.
Google isn’t dying. Search impressions have risen 49 per cent since AI Overviews launched, while click-throughs have fallen by around 30 per cent. More people are seeing results pages. Fewer are visiting anyone’s website.
The reason is the AI summary sitting at the top of the page. Pew Research found people clicked a traditional search result in only 8 per cent of visits when an AI summary was present, compared with 15 per cent when it wasn’t. By early 2026, fewer than one in three Google searches sent a click to anyone.
Small sites wore the worst of it. Chartbeat, tracking more than 2,500 sites, found search traffic down 60 per cent for small publishers, 47 per cent for mid-sized and 22 per cent for large ones over a single year.
Here’s the part that’s useful to you. Informational queries carry most of the damage. Branded and transactional queries have held up.
Read that again, because it changes where you spend your effort. Blog content answering general questions is the thing being eaten. Someone searching your business by name, or searching to buy, still lands on your site. Your name is now worth more than your keywords.
Hashtags aren’t a reach strategy any more
They haven’t been for a while, and the platforms have said so plainly.
Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, has stated that hashtags are not a primary way to increase reach, and that contrary to public belief they aren’t important for reach at all.
The product changes back that up. Instagram ended the ability to follow hashtags in December 2024, and now caps posts and Reels at five tags, down from thirty. Meta’s own recommendation is three to five highly relevant ones.
So if you’re still building sets of thirty, rotating them weekly and hiding them in the first comment, stop. That’s hours a month buying nothing.
Hashtags still do a job. They tell the algorithm what your content is about so it gets filed correctly and shown to people who care about your specific industry. Use three to five, make them specific, and choose them to describe the post rather than to chase an audience.
What drives reach instead: watch time, sends per reach, caption keywords, alt text and on-screen text. Write the caption in the words your customer would use to describe her problem. That’s the work now.
Your customers are asking AI who to hire
This is the newest shift and the one most business owners haven’t touched.
A woman looking for a bookkeeper, a coach, a physio or a lawyer increasingly asks an AI assistant for a recommendation before she ever opens a search page. That conversation happens without you, and you can’t buy your way into it. There’s no way to pay for an organic recommendation. Visibility has to be earned.
The gap this creates is real. Businesses are finding their rankings and traffic are fine, and yet when they ask an AI who the best providers in their category are, competitors appear and they don’t.
What the models draw on is corroboration. A consistent, recognisable business identity, content that answers real questions directly, and credible references to you across the web. Review volume and rating carry weight, and a solid rating with genuine responses to criticism signals more than a perfect score built on three reviews.
Strip away the jargon and that’s reputation. Being known, being consistent, being talked about by other people. The infrastructure changed. What it rewards didn’t.
What this means for your marketing
Three things follow.
Owned beats borrowed. An email list, a referral relationship and a client who tells three people don’t get rewritten by a platform update in December. Every hour spent optimising for someone else’s algorithm is an hour not spent on an asset you control.
Your name is an asset. Branded search still converts while general content gets absorbed. That makes visibility, speaking, podcasts, referrals and reviews commercially valuable, not vanity activity.
Volume was never the strategy. Thirty hashtags, daily posting and content for the sake of the algorithm were always a substitute for having something worth saying. The systems have simply stopped rewarding the substitute.
What to do this month
- Cut hashtag sets to three to five specific tags and delete the saved lists.
- Rewrite your key page headings as the questions a client would actually ask, and answer each one in the first paragraph.
- Make your business details identical everywhere they appear. Name, description, services, location. Inconsistency is why AI systems can’t confidently recommend you.
- Ask five happy clients for a review this month, and reply to every review you have.
- Ask an AI assistant who the best providers are in your category and location. Write down what comes back. That’s your starting position.
- Take the time you were spending on hashtag research and put it into one conversation with a warm prospect.
Number six will make you more money than the other five combined.
None of this is a reason to panic. It’s a reason to stop doing work that stopped paying, and put the hours somewhere they compound.
As the owner of Fempire and Trudy Heins Business Coaching, Trudy’s mission is to help women create strong, strategic, and financially resilient businesses, the kind that support the life you really want.
With over 35 years in business and finance including 30 years as a Certified Financial Planner. Trudy has built and sold multiple businesses, led high-performing national sales teams, and coached hundreds of women to achieve lasting success.
She knows what it takes to go from idea to income and from coach to company owner.
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