If your paid search has delivered less this year for the same spend, you're not imagining it, and your agency probably hasn't broken anything. The top of the search page has changed. An AI-written answer now sits above both the ads and the organic links, and it has quietly changed what advertising money can buy.
Here's what has happened, why it matters for UK marketers, and what to do about it.
What's actually happening to PPC?
People are getting their answer before they reach the ads. On searches where Google shows an AI Overview, Seer Interactive found paid click-through rates fell 68% between June 2024 and September 2025, from 19.7% to 6.34%.
It isn't only clicks. Across 14 industries tracked in 2026, Google Ads conversion rates fell year on year in 13 of them, by 9.28% on average (Foundry CRO).
The picture isn't a simple collapse, though. Seer's 2026 update found paid CTR on AI Overview searches recovered slightly in early 2026, while paid CTR on searches without an AI Overview kept falling, from 26.0% to 21.8%. The pressure is broad, and it's still moving.
Why are my Google Ads clicks down?
Check the usual suspects first: tracking, budgets, match types and ad assets. But if those are fine and clicks are still sliding, the likely cause is upstream of your account. Your buyers are asking AI tools their questions and getting a short, confident answer. Fewer of them scroll to an ad, and the ones who do arrive later in their decision.
In the UK this is now normal behaviour. Google's AI Mode has been live here since July 2025, and ChatGPT reaches hundreds of millions of people every week.
Is PPC dead?
No. Advertisers have followed users into AI search, and paid placements now appear in AI answers too. The real change is narrower and more interesting: money no longer buys the top of the page.
For twenty years, PPC let a business sit above better-known competitors simply by outbidding them. The ad came first and the merit came second. In AI search, that order has flipped.
What do ChatGPT ads look like in the UK?
ChatGPT ads went live in the UK on 6 June 2026. They appear as a small card labelled "Sponsored", placed below ChatGPT's own answer, never inside it. They're shown only to users on the free and low-cost Go plans; paying subscribers don't see them.
That placement is the whole story. The AI's recommendation comes first. The paid slot comes after the user already has their answer.
Why can't you buy the AI answer?
Because the answer and the ad are produced separately. OpenAI has said publicly that ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives, and that ads are generated after the response and kept apart from it (geotoolbox).
So the most valuable position, being named in the answer, can't be bought. It's earned by being the source the AI trusts on that topic.
And it feeds back into paid performance. Seer found that brands cited in Google's AI Overviews saw 35% higher organic click-through and 91% higher paid click-through than brands that weren't. Being in the answer makes every remaining ad pound work harder.
Content marketing vs PPC: what changes now?
The old comparison went: PPC is fast but stops when you stop paying; content is slow but compounds. That's still true, but it misses the new point. Content is now how you get into the answer, and being in the answer is what lifts your paid results.
That doesn't mean any content. AI tools favour material that:
- states a direct answer to a real question in its opening lines
- is clearly structured, with headings or chapters a machine can follow
- is kept up to date rather than written once and left
- comes from a source that is consistently associated with one specific subject
That last point matters most. Being known for one thing beats being vaguely present everywhere. This is what we mean by premium content: not expensive for its own sake, but authoritative, specific and built to be the best answer to a question your buyers actually ask.
Why video gets cited by AI search
Video is one of the strongest formats for this, and most brands are underusing it. YouTube is the single most-cited domain in Google's AI Overviews, at 29.5% of citations, ahead of sources like Mayo Clinic.
Two honest caveats. Different AI tools behave differently: Perplexity and Google's AI features cite YouTube heavily, while ChatGPT rarely links to it, though YouTube mentions still shape how AI models see a brand. And format matters. In one experiment, short clips cut from a long broadcast were cited 3.2 times more often than the full show.
The lesson: short, focused videos that each answer one real question, with chapters and a transcript, outperform one long brand film. A single day of filming can produce a season of these.
What to do this quarter
- Keep your best-performing PPC. Bottom-of-funnel and branded campaigns still earn their keep. Trim spend on broad, informational keywords where AI answers now dominate.
- Ask the AI about your market. Type the five questions your buyers ask into ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google. Note who gets named. That's your real competition now.
- Pick one thing to be known for. Choose the topic where you have genuine authority, not the broadest one.
- Build answers, not adverts. Create a small library of short videos and pages, each answering one of those questions directly. Publish on your site and YouTube, with transcripts.
- Refresh, don't forget. Revisit the cornerstone pieces every quarter. AI tools prefer content that's maintained.
Paid search isn't going away. But it's no longer enough to outbid the competition. The brands that win the next few years will be the ones the AI already trusts.
Little Orchard makes premium video content designed to be found and cited by AI search. If you'd like to see how your brand shows up today, email us at info@littleorchardmedia.com.
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