Paid search is planned, bid on and reported around the click. The working assumption has always been that a click was where major decisions begin: someone lands on your site undecided and your job in paid search was to win them over. That led to many believing that more clicks meant more chances to do that, so click volume became the number everyone watched.
That assumption has been wearing out for some time now and an ever growing share of the people who click have already made up their minds. The way paid search is built means it cannot see how they got there. Three things follow, and each one changes how a click should be bought and judged.
By the time they click, they have mostly decided
Picture someone buying travel insurance for a family ski trip. Not long ago they would have typed a few words into Google, opened five or six tabs of comparison sites and policy pages, read the small print on each, and slowly narrowed the list down. Your site was one of the places where that narrowing happened, thanks to either upper funnel Brand Awareness and reach or your generic paid search spend helped drive clicks during the start of the decision.
Now picture the same person asking ChatGPT to compare three policies for a family of four skiing in Austria in February, with medical cover for a parent who has a heart condition. They get a shortlist, the reasons behind each option and probably a recommendation. The reading, comparing and eliminating all happen inside the answer. When they finally visit an insurer’s site, they go there to buy the policy they have already chosen. The click is now one of the last steps in the decision.
That behaviour is increasingly mainstream. ChatGPT passed 1 billion monthly active users in May 2026. Among people using it for shopping-related tasks, roughly 70% turn to it for research and discovery, and just over half use it specifically to compare products before buying. Comparing products is the moment paid search has always tried to win, and it has moved somewhere search advertising has barely begun to operate.
Our own data shows the early signs of the same shift. Across 54 clients, organic sessions fell 10.5% in the eight months after AI Overviews became common, compared with the eight months before, and visits from AI platforms replaced only around 5% of what was lost. Our SEO team’s read is that Overviews trigger overwhelmingly on informational searches and are starting to reach commercial ones, so the research stage is increasingly finished inside the answer. The full numbers are in our analysis of those 54 clients
Paid search cannot see the part where they decide
Paid search runs on keywords, and keywords were always a workaround. Advertisers could not target what someone wanted, so they bought the words people typed as the nearest available stand-in. Match types, negative keyword lists and search term reports are all tools for guessing at intent from a handful of words.
Go back to the ski trip. In the old version, you saw “travel insurance skiing” and had to guess the rest. Was it a family or a solo traveller? Any health conditions? What budget? Do I have any any 1st Party Data to help me decide? In the ChatGPT version, all of that is written out in full, because the person is talking to an assistant they expect to take it into account. Everything you used to guess at is sitting in the prompt, and none of it is a single keyword you can bid on. The conversation happens on a surface your account has no view of, so the stage where the person weighed up their options never shows up as a search query, an impression or a click. The first thing paid search sees is the visit that follows.
Our own Google Ads data fits with this. Across 31 accounts, from high street retailers to insurers and charities, Search’s share of spend fell from 86% in January 2024 to 71% in August 2026, and its share of clicks fell from 62% to 41% as Performance Max, Shopping, Demand Gen and video took a growing share of the clicks we buy. Search still takes most of the budget, but it now delivers well under half of the clicks.
Value the click by what it earns
The clicks that do arrive from AI platforms are worth more. Their key event rate reached 13.4% against 10.4% for organic search, and by April 2026 the gap had widened to roughly 1.5 times. That is what you would expect from people who compared their options before they arrived.
To see why that matters for reporting, take an illustration using those rates. A campaign that brings 1,000 clicks at a 10.4% key event rate delivers 104 conversions. A campaign that brings 800 clicks at 1.5 times that rate, 15.6%, delivers about 125. A report that counts clicks calls the second campaign the weaker one, while the business has gained around 20 more conversions from 200 fewer clicks. Fewer, but more likely to convert and with higher purchase intent, clicks can be worth more.
The fix on the bidding side for a number of years now has been to pass accurate first-party conversion value back to the platforms, so automated bidding can compete harder for the clicks that earn more. A higher value per click widens the inventory a business can afford to win.
ChatGPT’s ads are an early way to pay to appear inside the conversation. Targeting is contextual to the prompt, and with no conversion optimisation yet you buy impressions and clicks and have to work out the value yourself. Early CPMs have ranged from around £15 for niche placements to £60 for competitive ones, averaging close to £20 to £25, and with competition still thin, now is a cheap time to learn what a click in that environment is worth.
Measurement is the part nobody has solved. AI referral visits regularly get recorded as direct traffic, because someone asks the chat. So much so that Google states that ChatGPT product considerations 99% of the time result in Google Searches for purchase decision making. Everything quoted in this piece, our own figures included, probably understates the real scale. Giving AI referrals their own channel in GA4 shows their conversion rate separately, and a holdout group is the only way to show what ChatGPT ads caused. Both are far easier to build before finance asks for a clean number than after.
Getting there before the auction gets crowded
The decision that used to happen after the click now mostly happens before it. Search advertising’s job is shifting from winning the click to earning a place inside the answer that precedes it. The brands that get there first, while the format is still rough and the CPMs haven’t caught up to Google’s, are the ones who’ll set the terms for everyone who tests it after them.
