The classic list of blue links is giving way to a direct answer. Dutch advertising trade body VIA Nederland published findings from its Search Taskforce on 24 June 2026, laying out six structural shifts that its members believe are rewriting the practice of search marketing - from how users find information to how professionals should measure their work.

From results to answers

The paper - published by VIA Verenigd In Advertising, a trade association headquartered at Wibautstraat 224 in Amsterdam - draws on discussion from the most recent meeting of the VIA Search Taskforce. It covers six propositions that members debated to map what a shifting search landscape means for the profession.

The first and most immediate shift is the move from a ranked list of results to a synthesised answer. According to VIA Nederland, AI Overviews, Google's AI Mode, and conversational assistants such as Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, and Gemini now give users a summarised response rather than ten links to choose from. The consequence is a reduction in the structural need to click through to an external website.

The traffic evidence for this is substantial. Ahrefs research published in February 2026 - covering 300,000 keywords using aggregated Google Search Console data - found that the presence of AI Overviews correlates with a 58% reduction in click-through rates for the top-ranked page. That figure had been 34.5% in April 2025. Position-one click-through rates for AI Overview queries fell from 0.073 in December 2023 to 0.016 by December 2025. The deterioration is not uniform across sectors: health and nutrition publishers saw ad-opportunity declines of between 40% and 50%, while news and politics verticals held more stable.

VIA Nederland notes the dynamic differs by position in the purchase funnel. For simple informational queries, the click disappears; for complex buying decisions requiring comparison and deeper research, the need to engage with external sources persists. The practical question is not whether users still search but where and how the answer is constructed - and whether advertisers appear within it.

From SEO to GEO

The second shift runs directly from the first. When answers are assembled by AI rather than retrieved as individual links, the discipline of optimisation shifts too. According to VIA Nederland, alongside classical SEO the industry is now talking increasingly about GEO: Generative Engine Optimization. The goal is no longer solely a high position in the organic results but presence and citation inside the AI-generated answer itself.

That framing places GEO alongside, not above, established SEO practice. Google's VP of Search, Brendon Kraham, published a piece in June 2026 arguing explicitly that "good SEO is good GEO," stating that AI Mode and AI Overviews are "built directly on top of our core ranking systems" and therefore require no fundamentally different optimization discipline. Lily Ray, VP of SEO Strategy at Amsive, warned in May 2026 that aggressive GEO tactics were already being treated as spam, with Cyrus Shepard's analysis of 54 experiments identifying search rank as the second-highest predictor of AI citation, scoring 9.4 out of 10.

According to VIA Nederland, the content characteristics that give a site the best chance of being cited in AI answers include clear structure, demonstrated authority, and presence on the platforms from which language models draw - including Reddit and YouTube alongside a brand's own website. Measureability remains a live problem. The taskforce notes that concrete signals are beginning to emerge. Microsoft launched its AI Performance dashboard in Bing Webmaster Tools on 10 February 2026, offering publishers their first view of how often AI systems cite their content across Microsoft Copilot and AI-generated summaries in Bing. The dashboard tracks total citations, average cited pages per day, grounding queries, and page-level citation activity. On 23 March 2026, Microsoft expanded it to map grounding queries directly to specific cited pages - the most-requested enhancement after the February launch. Microsoft Clarity's Citations feature moved to general availability on 13 May 2026, adding page citation counts, share of authority relative to competing domains, and AI referral traffic inside the Clarity platform.

VIA Nederland flags that GEO remains partly opaque. The practical prescription from the taskforce is to keep experimenting and document everything carefully.

AI agents and the preferred source

The third shift concerns personal AI agents - software systems that search, compare, and potentially transact on a user's behalf. According to VIA Nederland, in that scenario a brand is no longer communicating only with a human being but also with that person's digital assistant. Whichever brand the agent treats as the preferred source - the default recommendation - gains a substantial structural advantage.

The taskforce describes this as moving toward a "winner takes all" dynamic. If an assistant routinely proposes one supplier or source, visibility becomes more binary than advertisers have been accustomed to. VIA Nederland characterises this as still largely forward-looking, with open questions around data, integrations, and trust. The signal for practitioners now is to invest in strong, reliable brand presence and in data sources that agents will be able to use.

That framing connects to a pattern the advertising technology industry has moved toward rapidly in 2026. The Trade Desk launched its first in-platform AI agent, Koa Agents, in April 2026. Amazon's Ads Agent has accepted natural language campaign management commands - including ROAS-based pause instructions - since November 2025. The preference-source question VIA Nederland raises sits one step upstream from campaign automation: it concerns which brands agents are trained, via web content and product data, to treat as authoritative.

HubSpot data published in June 2026 found that AI search had become the single strongest predictor of purchase intent among B2B buyers, surpassing product demos, review sites, and sales calls in a survey of more than 3,000 decision-makers. The stakes of being the preferred source are therefore not theoretical.

Automation: adapt or fall behind

The fourth proposition in VIA Nederland's document is the most operationally immediate. Automation is no longer a feature of paid search's future - it is its present. According to VIA Nederland, Performance Max, Broad Match, and AI Max mean search engines are taking over an increasing share of targeting, bidding, and creative decisions. Scale and efficiency are the gains; direct control and transparency over what is happening inside the system are the costs.

The taskforce's collective position is pragmatic: stopping automation is not a realistic option, but trusting it blindly is not either. According to VIA Nederland, the value lies in steering - by providing the right input, clear goals, high-quality feeds, and first-party data, practitioners give the systems the best possible direction. Understanding the underlying logic produces better outcomes than delegating everything.

Google declared AI Max out of beta on 15 April 2026, announcing simultaneously that Dynamic Search Ads would be automatically upgraded to AI Max starting September 2026 - one of the most structurally significant changes to Google's search advertising infrastructure in years. The timeline was later revised: on 11 June 2026, Google delayed the DSA-to-AI Max automatic migration to February 2027 in response to advertiser feedback, while confirming that campaigns using Automatically Created Assets and campaign-level Broad Match would still be auto-upgraded in September 2026. A voluntary upgrade tool remains available to advertisers wishing to manage the transition on their own schedule.

At Google Marketing Live 2026 on 20 May, Google's VP of Ads and Commerce Vidhya Srinivasan confirmed that appearing in new AI Search ad formats - including Conversational Discovery ads and Highlighted Answers - requires AI Max for Search or Performance Max with text customisation. The practical implication, as VIA Nederland's framing captures, is that advertisers who want access to AI Mode and AI Overviews inventory must operate inside the automated framework. The degree to which that automation can be steered - through negative keywords, text guidelines, brand controls, and AI Brief inputs - is where practitioner expertise now resides.

Google launched a branded search toggle inside AI Max in June 2026, giving advertisers the ability to restrict AI Max campaigns to unbranded queries only - addressing a concern that prospecting campaigns routing branded traffic would distort performance data in both directions.

New KPIs and billing models

The fifth proposition follows logically from the preceding changes. If clicks are saying less about the value an interaction delivers, then measurement and billing models must adapt too. According to VIA Nederland, alongside familiar metrics such as ROAS and CPA, the industry is looking more emphatically at what happens after the click: actual value, margin, and customer lifetime value. The taskforce also highlighted a shift away from pure CPC thinking toward value- or outcome-based models - sometimes described as CPS, cost per sale - and toward hybrid approaches.

This is not a detached theoretical debate. NP Digital research published in May 2026 found that original research generates AI citations in 82% of cases - the highest of any content format - while comparison content scored 76%, both performing substantially better than formats AI can produce from its own training data. The argument that follows is practical: if the metric is AI citation rather than organic position, then content investment needs to be evaluated against that outcome, not against page impressions or bounce rates.

VIA Nederland's conclusion is that businesses should steer toward the value that matters to them, not just toward volume at the top of the funnel. Better data connections are required, as is the willingness to look beyond standard reporting outputs. Mediaocean's 2026 H2 Market Report published in June 2026 found that AI-powered automation and cross-channel orchestration entered the top five capability priorities for the first time in that survey's history, with data gaps, lack of integration with existing stacks, and unclear ROI named as the main barriers to scaling. The VIA Nederland position - that steering requires better data connections - maps directly onto that diagnosis.

The new search marketer

The sixth and final shift is the broadest. All of the preceding changes together are reshaping the professional role of the search marketer. According to VIA Nederland, where a specialist could previously sit deep inside a single discipline, the current environment asks for a broader profile: what the taskforce calls a "T-shaped" marketer. Someone who understands the technology but is equally at home with data, content, and strategy. In the words used at the meeting - as quoted in VIA Nederland's document - the search marketer is becoming "a good deal more generalist."

The framing is constructive rather than alarming. As execution automates further, the taskforce argues, the value of the human practitioner shifts toward direction: setting the right goals, feeding the right inputs into the systems, interpreting the outputs, and connecting the whole to broader marketing and business objectives. From adjusting levers to providing direction.

That shift in the nature of the role echoes a wider observation from Google's own marketing keynote in May 2026. In the words of Google's Song - cited in PPC Land's coverage of that event - "When the technical side becomes easier for everyone, your true edge comes back to what only you can provide: your strategy."

Four takeaways from the taskforce

VIA Nederland closes its document with four points the taskforce drew from the discussion, presented not as prescriptions but as shared orientations:

Agility matters. The speed of development means flexibility has become a professional skill in its own right, not a background condition. Stay testing. Much is still not measurable; experimenting and documenting make the difference between practitioners who understand what is changing and those who are guessing. Think broadly. Data, content, and strategy belong in the search marketer's domain as fully as the technical platform tools. Share knowledge. The collective learns faster than individuals working alone - which is, according to VIA Nederland, precisely what the Taskforce exists to enable.

The document positions search not as shrinking but as changing form. The interface is shifting toward answers, the optimisation discipline toward GEO, execution toward automation, and the professional role toward direction. IAB Europe's Chief Economist Daniel Knapp, presenting at Cannes Lions 2026, offered a compatible macro reading: that AI systems are reducing the number of options shown to consumers while making those options more relevant, making it structurally more consequential which brands appear in any given answer.

Timeline

Summary

Who: VIA Nederland (VIA Verenigd In Advertising), the Dutch advertising trade association based in Amsterdam, published findings from its Search Taskforce.

What: A document summarising six structural shifts in search marketing - the rise of AI-generated answers over ranked links; the shift from SEO to GEO as an optimisation discipline; the emergence of AI agents and the preferred-source dynamic; the consolidation of paid search automation through Performance Max and AI Max; the need for new KPIs tied to margin and lifetime value rather than click volume; and the broadening of the search marketer's role toward a T-shaped generalist profile.

When: Published on 24 June 2026, drawing on discussion from the most recent meeting of the VIA Search Taskforce.

Where: The document was published by VIA Nederland, headquartered at Wibautstraat 224, 1097 DN Amsterdam. The changes it describes affect search marketing practice across platforms available globally, including Google Search, Microsoft Bing, and AI assistants such as Copilot, ChatGPT, and Gemini.

Why: Search is not shrinking but changing form. The interface is moving toward AI-generated answers, the optimisation discipline toward citation-based GEO, execution toward automated campaign types that absorb human control, and the role of the practitioner toward strategy and direction rather than lever-adjustment. The taskforce concluded that flexibility, testing, broader thinking, and shared learning are now the defining professional qualities.