What has actually changed
Simple informational questions increasingly get answered directly on the results page or in a chatbot, so those clicks are harder to win. Questions where people are choosing a provider still lead to clicks, comparisons and enquiries, and AI tools often point people to specific businesses for those.
So the value has shifted from ranking for every question towards being the source that gets cited, and the business that gets recommended when someone is ready to buy.
What to do about it
Keep doing the fundamentals: technical health, useful pages, internal links and reputation. Rewrite key pages so the answer is clear and quotable. Put more effort into pages for buying-stage questions, such as comparisons, costs and how to choose. And start measuring AI mentions alongside rankings.