Gartner has confirmed the battle for authority is happening right now. Is your agency ready for the aftermath?
For decades, government agencies have measured digital success by a familiar yardstick: rank on Google, drive clicks to the .gov site and let citizens navigate from there. That yardstick is breaking. Citizens are no longer starting their search for information with a list of blue links; they're starting it with a single AI-generated answer, and in a growing number of cases, they never click through to a source at all.
Gartner has now put numbers behind what many of us have felt building for the past two years. The firm predicts that by 2028, an organization’s organic search traffic will fall by 50% or more as individuals embrace generative AI-powered search, and separately forecasts a 25% decline in traditional search engine volume by the end of this year as AI chatbots and virtual agents take over as answer engines. That's not just a trend. For government, it's a governance problem.
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