Is Google’s Discovery Role Weakening in a No-Click World?

An evidence-based investigation from AIVO Journal

Executive Summary

The headlines say Google is collapsing as AI assistants like ChatGPT and Gemini take over. Our tests suggest the truth is more complicated.

• Assistants increasingly pre-allocate answers. Brands appear — or vanish — without a click.
• Google still mediates discovery, but often invisibly.
• Traffic stability can be misleading. Boards risk assuming safety while competitors substitute inside assistant answers.

The verdict: Google is not collapsing, but its power is being hollowed out from above.

Three Questions Boards Must Ask

1. How often do assistants give our brand as an answer? (Answer Share)

• In our pilot set of high-intent prompts, assistants regularly substituted competitors in place of incumbents.
• Example: in EV prompts, Tesla appeared in 7 of 10 assistant answers while BMW dropped to 4.

2. Do users still see a clickable path? (Click Potential)

• Google surfaces 3–4 above-the-fold links on average.
• Assistants return fewer than 1 clickable path per query.

3. Do assistants still depend on Google sources? (Discovery Dependency)

• In Banking queries, over half of assistant answers drew on pages that first surfaced on Google — even when no Google click occurred.

Board Call-Out

📌 Stable traffic ≠ safe brand. You can look steady in Google while vanishing from assistant answers where decisions are made.

What Our Early Tests Suggest

• Auto EVs: Assistants reward challengers (Tesla) even as Google rankings hold.
• Banking: Citibank recall fell sharply in assistants despite steady Google links.
• Luxury: Fast fashion brands replace heritage names in answers.
• SaaS CRM: Salesforce vanished from Claude’s answers; HubSpot and Zoho took the slots.

👉 These are pilot findings. Full reproducibility packs will be published sector-by-sector during October.

What Would Prove Collapse

• Assistants answer 70%+ of commercial queries,
• Google shows near-zero click opportunities,
• Assistant answers rarely depend on Google discovery.

What Would Prove Chimera

• Assistants answer <40% of commercial queries,
• Google click exposure stays above 80%,
• Assistant answers mostly depend on Google content.

Reality today sits between these curves: assistants substitute inside the answer layer, but still lean on Google for source material.

Board Call-Out

📌 Ask: What is our assistant answer share, and how does it compare to our Google exposure? If that shifted 20 points in a retrain, how would we know?

Methodology (At a Glance)

• Prompts: 20 per sector, pre-registered.
• Assistants tested: ChatGPT 4o, Gemini 1.5, Claude 3.5.
• Locales: US & EU English, neutral signed-out sessions.
• Test window: October 3, 2025.
• Evidence: Prompt list, outputs, and screenshots archived. Reproducibility packs begin release Oct 17.

Conclusion

Google is not collapsing. But the economic value it controls is eroding as assistants pre-allocate answers. Dashboards that only report traffic mask this risk.

Boards must track assistant answer share, click potential, and discovery dependency with reproducible evidence — or risk governing blind.