Paid click-through on Google queries that carry an AI Overview fell from 19.70 percent to 6.34 percent between June 2024 and September 2025, a 68 percent decline. Queries without an Overview fell too, from 19.1 percent to 13.04 percent. More than 80 percent of searches now end without a click. (Search Influence, 2026)
McKinsey puts the longer arc at 20 to 50 percent of open-web search traffic at risk by 2030, with value moving from attention to what it calls transaction influence: being the product the agent picks. (McKinsey, The agentic advertising economy)
The number that matters for hiring
Brands cited inside AI answers show 91 percent higher paid click-through than brands that are not cited. (Search Influence, 2026)
That single figure rewrites the paid search job description. The lead who used to own bids, match types and Quality Score now owns whether the brand appears in the answer at all. Impression share and on-SERP visibility replace click-through as the first metric. AI referral traffic, brand citation rate and share of voice in conversational search join the dashboard. Assisted and micro-conversions replace the last click.
None of that is SEO work in the old sense. It sits with whoever controls paid budget and first-party data, because the models optimize to the conversions they can see.
What the register shows
Titles are changing before headcount does. Postings that would have read Paid Search Director two years ago now read Search and AI Visibility, Answer Engine Lead, or fold search into a Performance and Measurement seat. The compensation on those seats tracks the analytics market, not the media-buying market.
What a hiring manager has to get right
Isolate performance on queries with an Overview from queries without one, so cannibalization is measured rather than argued about.
Put budget behind transactional intent and layer first-party audiences, because that is where the click still exists.
Hire for citation. The person who can get the brand named inside the answer is doing paid search's job, whatever the title says.
The Pulse tracks search and visibility titles in the register, the comp shift on search leads, and the share of senior marketing postings that name an AI visibility metric. Numbers publish when there are enough of them to compare.
The work
AP fills the visibility seat and, where a client is not ready to hire it, runs the measurement setup inside marketing operations until they are.
Sources: Search Influence, How AI Search Affects Paid Ads in 2026. McKinsey, The agentic advertising economy: from attention to action.