Welcome to Break Point, your weekly hit of strategy, surf, and smart growth.

Each week, we send one high-impact growth move straight from the Pono Ventures playbook — and only Break Point readers get the goods.

Let’s drop in. 🌊

When SEO Dies (or Mutates)

For years, SEO was a dependable backbone. You rank #1, you get traffic. You build content, you win clicks.

But the ground is shifting. With AI-driven search, “ranking” isn’t enough. Many queries never send people to sites anymore.

Here’s what’s happening (and what to do about it):

The Quiet Erosion: Clicks Are Disappearing

• In the U.S., 58.5% of Google searches now end with zero clicks to external sites.

• When Google shows an AI Overview, organic CTRs drop 18–64%, depending on the query.

• A study of 25,000 user searches found: websites that rank #1 on Google only appear in AI search results ~25% of the time.

In short: even if your SEO “works,” fewer people are clicking.

The Algorithm Is Evolving — Faster Than Before

• Google rolled out several core updates in 2025 that upended many search engine results.

• The March 2025 update emphasized EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust). Sites that lacked topical depth took big hits.

• New is Google’s “AI Mode”, which tries to deliver conversational-style answers instead of a list of links — further reducing clickthroughs.

• Algorithm updates are now happening more often, with shifts in how Google weights signals like content intent, freshness, and trust.

Legacy SEO tactics such as keyword stuffing, brute backlink volume, thin content are being demoted quickly.

The Test Case: A Hypothetical (But Realistic) Scenario

Imagine a B2B SaaS firm whose growth came from ranking #1 for 50 high-intent keywords. They got 100K visits per month from organic.

• After AI Overviews appear for many of their queries, CTR drops 30%. Traffic dips to ~70K.

• Their core topics now appear as AI “answers” lifted from content they and others published. Users never click through.

• Because they never built brand signals or external authority outside the SEO silo, AI systems skip citing them in their answers.

• Their content looks too generic; it lacks rigorous data, original angles, or sourceable claims, so AI engines demote it in favor of more “authoritative” sources.

• They scramble to recover, but see only partial gains via long-tail keywords or niche verticals.

They’ve lost their biggest flywheel.

The Reality Check: SEO Isn’t Dead — It’s Redefined

SEO still matters. AI search often builds on traditional search signals. If you rank high on Google, your chance of being cited in AI answers is real. Search volume is still growing, but the path to your domain is changing. Some content still directs clicks; not every query ends inside AI. But you need to elevate your strategy from “rank pages” → “own narratives, be cited, survive reduction to atoms.”

Want to talk marketing with the Pono team?

Book a call with one of our founders! We do four strategy sessions a week helping companies beat their growth targets (no strings attached).

Weekly Beach Vibes

In life, pono stands for righteousness and balance. In Hawaiian, if a person is living pono, it means that they have struck the right balance in their relationships with other things, places, and people in their lives. It also means that they've made a conscious decision to do right by themselves, by others, and by the world in general.

We live by Pono.