It’s a term that’s starting to circulate to describe a major shift in search: the decoupling of discovery (search, navigation, Q&A) from traditional websites and SEO into AI-first experiences. It means people aren’t going through Google to get to sites anymore — they’re just asking AI, and AI is answering without necessarily passing the traffic back.
That means traffic, visibility, and influence aren’t guaranteed by search rankings anymore.
This changes everything:
- SEO becomes less about ranking in Google, and more about structuring content in ways AI can understand — through semantic markup, clean language, and machine-readable formats.
- Branding and tone matter more than ever, because people may start asking for answers in your voice.
- Websites shift from lead funnels to knowledge bases, meant to feed both humans and machines.
- And language becomes strategic — the right words are how you “call in” the right functions or outcomes.
This decoupling can be a process towards an easier, more conversational internet, where chatbots will be mandatory in each website. Or it can become an echo-chamber where AI spirals out of control for lack of grounding. This will depend in great measure if standards default to show citations and sources–like Perplexity does–or not.