Click economy
The click economy is the old deal of web search: search engines send visitors to websites, and websites earn from those visits.
The click economy is the way web search has worked for most of its history. Someone types a few words, gets a page of links, and clicks one. The website they land on earns from the visit, through a sale, a sign-up or an ad.
It rested on a simple deal. Websites let search engines read their pages, and search engines sent people back. AI answers change that deal, because people can get what they need from the answer and never click.
What changes with AI answers
When an AI platform writes an answer, it reads pages, sums them up and sometimes links to a few. The person may click one of those links, or may be satisfied with the summary. Your page did the work either way, and the visit may never come.
For example, Fernhill's guide to making cold brew used to bring in around 2,000 visits a month from search. Now AI answers to "how do I make cold brew at home" sum the guide up and cite it. Visits to the page fall by half, while the page shows up in more answers than ever.
What to measure instead
If clicks are only part of the story, you need to know how often you're named and cited in the answers, as well as how many visitors they send. A brand that's recommended in the answer can win the customer without the click, when the person searches for the brand by name later or buys elsewhere.
That's why it helps to read the two side by side. Falling visits with rising visibility is a different problem from falling visits with falling visibility.
In AnswerOrbit
Your visibility and citations show how often the answers name you and use your site. The AI traffic tab in Website shows the visits AI assistants send you, from Google Analytics, so you can put the two next to each other.