May 8, 2026
Felipe Bazon walked off the BrightonSEO main stage straight into our SEO Brein podcast booth. The first question landed inside the first thirty seconds. I asked how he was telling clients about AI Overviews eating into their traffic. Felipe shrugged. “None of my clients complain about that.”
That answer should not be possible in May 2026
Ahrefs's December 2025 data shows a 58% click-through-rate collapse on top-ranking pages whenever an AI Overview appears in the SERP. Seer Interactive's tracking across 42 client organizations puts the organic CTR drop at 61% on AIO queries between June 2024 and September 2025. Both studies agree on the direction. Both call the new floor "the new baseline".
Every SEO agency owner I talk to is fielding the same question on Tuesday client calls: "Why is our traffic falling and what are you doing about it?" The polished answer is a deck pivot to GEO services, AI search audits, and prompt engineering retainers.
Felipe pivoted nothing. He is the Chief SEO Officer of Hedgehog Digital, with twenty years in the work, operating from São Paulo with clients across Europe and the Americas. His clients did not call about traffic loss. He never sold them traffic.
In September 2024, on the BrightonSEO San Diego stage, Felipe predicted entity SEO and topical authority would be the cleanest cut against AI Overviews once they launched. The talk barely registered at the time. AI Overviews were a rumor. Not a SERP feature.
A year later, AIOs were live across most informational queries. Felipe watched his client portfolio's visibility climb in the new format while peers watched their dashboards bleed. He returned to BrightonSEO last month with a follow-up talk titled "Entity SEO, Topical Authority and Information Gain in the Age of AI Searches".
The framework worked. He kept reporting the same metric to his clients that he had been reporting for a decade. It was not traffic.
How does Felipe sell SEO without saying SEO?
Most SEO sales decks open with a technical audit. Felipe opens with one sentence: "I help you be found when potential clients are searching for you." He does not say SEO until later in the conversation, and even then, he frames it as search engine optimization across every platform people use to find products in 2026.
His client framework is four moves. Audit. Plan. Execute. Report. Each move gets described to the buyer in business language, not engineering language. Technical SEO compresses to three words: access, semantics, and performance. Bots have to access the site. The code has to be organized. The page has to load fast. Anything more granular than that does not survive the client meeting.
The fight matters because of where SEO sits in most companies. The technical department buys SEO when the agency frames the work as crawlability, structured data, and canonical tags. The marketing department buys SEO when the agency frames the work as customer acquisition, brand visibility, and revenue. Felipe has spent two decades climbing out of the first room and into the second.
GEO is helping him climb faster. CMOs and CEOs who would not take a meeting with an SEO director three years ago are asking their teams about AI Overview citations. Felipe's calendar fills up with conversations he was previously locked out of. The same client base that used to hire him through IT is now hiring him through marketing.
That positional move is the one most agency owners miss when rebranding their decks.
Why does Felipe report revenue and never traffic?
The audit Felipe runs at the start of every engagement is the same audit he ran in 2018. The content strategy is the same content strategy he ran in 2018. The reporting cadence is the same. Revenue.
Some of his clients lost traffic over the past eighteen months. Some maintained. A few even gained. None flagged the traffic shift as a problem because traffic was not the contracted deliverable. Rankings continued moving up. AI Overview citations started appearing. The sales pipeline kept closing.
The mechanic underneath that line is content strategy that supports transactional pages instead of competing with publishers. Blog content has one job: build entity recognition in the knowledge graph and topical authority around the products clients sell.
The internal links from those articles point at category and product pages. The transactional pages rank because the supporting content has done the structural work.
That sentence has cost him at least three pitches in the last year. Clients who came in asking for "more traffic" got told they had hired the wrong agency. The clients who stayed got a different deal: content that builds authority for the pages that actually convert, and the publishers can chase eyeballs.
When AI Overviews began compressing answer-stage queries into citations, Felipe's clients lost the high-funnel traffic they had never been measuring.
The transactional traffic stayed intact because AIOs are not yet eating commercial-intent queries at the same rate, and the entity work was paying off in citation share when AI search did surface.
That is the structural reason none of his clients complained. The metric he had sold them was not on the chopping block.
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What does GEO actually change for an SEO agency?
The GEO conversation in 2026 mostly fights about tactics. Should you optimize for ChatGPT or Perplexity? How do you earn AI Overview citations? Does structured data still matter, more than ever, or not at all?
Felipe's answer to those questions is the same set of moves he was running in 2024. Build the brand as a recognized entity. Reference and be referenced by other entities in the same topic graph.
Publish content with information gain (a substantive addition to what the answer corpus already says, not a rephrase of it). Diversify link sources, since Google still penalizes uniform link profiles, whether the algorithm is ranking pages or selecting AI Overview citations.
The information gain conversation is where Felipe pushes hardest. AI tools have made it cheap to produce 600-word articles that say nothing new. Search engines (classical and generative) are getting faster at filtering them out.
Just like Seeders, his content team still uses human writers, with AI for research and idea generation. The differentiator is the in-depth client research that surfaces primary data, market positioning, and customer-specific signals no competitor article can copy.
The bigger shift Felipe sees is organizational. SEO used to sit "in the basement of the company", as he puts it, hired by the technical department to fix crawlability problems. AI search is moving the function upstairs.
CMOs want to know if they are visible in ChatGPT and AI Overviews. The team they call about that question is the SEO team. The SEO team gets invited to brand and budget conversations it was excluded from for fifteen years
What AI search actually exposed
Two cohorts of SEO agencies are emerging from the AI search transition. One cohort sold their clients traffic. The other sold revenue, leads, signups, demos, sales.
The first cohort is fielding panicked client calls and pivoting decks to GEO services. The second cohort, including Felipe's, is taking new meetings with CMOs.
The agencies that sold traffic did not get punished by AI Overviews. They got punished by the way they had positioned the work for years. AI search reduced the visible asset they had been billing for. With nothing else on the contract, the bill became indefensible. Clients renegotiate or churn.
The agencies that sold revenue did not receive rewards from AI Overviews either. They got the same outcome they had been delivering for years.
The supporting content continued to build entity authority. The transactional pages kept ranking. The pipeline kept closing. Traffic moved around on the dashboard. The number that mattered did not.
The shift Felipe described in the BrightonSEO podcast booth is the moment a long-running positional choice paid off in public. AI search exposed which agencies had built their value proposition on a metric that could be taken away. AI Overviews removed that metric. The agencies that sold a different number did not feel it.
If your SEO contract does not name a number that survives a 58% CTR collapse, that contract is what AI search has exposed. The fix is not a GEO add-on. It starts in the scope that your agency signed.
What good SEO looks like for clients in 2026
Two practical moves come out of Felipe's positioning, whether you are running an SEO program in-house or hiring an agency to run it for you.
First, anchor the scope on the number that the marketing team has to defend to the CFO. Not traffic. Not "AIO citation rate", which is the new vanity metric replacing the old one. Revenue. Leads. Trials. Demos booked.
Whatever the budget is paying for on Monday morning, the marketing leader has to explain the results. Seer Interactive's recommendation lines up: replace traffic-centric KPIs with branded search lift, citation share, and assisted conversions.
Second, expect entity SEO, topical authority, and information gain to be part of the standing engagement, not a separately-billed GEO service line. The signals AI search engines use to select citations are the same signals Google's classical ranking has weighted heavily since at least 2022.
The content team that writes information-gain pieces ranks higher in AI Overviews and in classical search. Same plumbing. Different output formats. An agency adding "GEO retainer" line items on top of an SEO retainer is selling the same work twice.
This is how we work with clients ourselves. The clients we run engagements for were not blindsided by the AI Overview rollout because the contract anchor was always revenue. The supporting content was always doing entity work. AI search shifted the surface, not the underlying engagement.
Felipe spent twenty years building his agency on this position. The current moment looks familiar to anyone running an SEO program this way. The clients on the other side of those engagements are not the ones renegotiating contracts.
That is the dividend on having bought the right thing all along.
Listen to the conversation
Hear Felipe Bazon's full breakdown of entity SEO, topical authority, and information gain in the AI search era on the SEO Brain podcast. Recorded at BrightonSEO 2026.
Head of SEO
As Head of SEO at Seeders, Hans helps companies scale smarter by combining search behaviour, paid performance, and conversion insights into systems that drive real growth. Recognised as a Top 20 Content Marketer by Small Business Trends, he brings a lean, experimental approach focused on building what actually works. Rather than relying on reports or one-off strategies, Hans focuses on creating marketing systems and tools that turn visibility into measurable business impact. His goal is simple: help clients move from scattered efforts to structured growth.
