Is Google AI Overviews Killing Your Traffic?

A client came to me last month convinced their SEO had broken. Rankings unchanged, same keywords, same positions on page one, but traffic down almost a third year on year. Nothing in Google Search Console flagged a penalty. No manual action. No algorithm update they could point to. The site just quietly stopped getting clicked for some reason.

Reality is that it hadn't broken. Google had just started answering the question before anyone reached their site.

What's actually happening

AI Overviews are the AI-generated summary boxes that now sit at the top of many Google search results, pulling together an answer from several sources and presenting it directly on the results page. If someone searches "how often should I service a boiler" and gets a full answer in the Overview, there's no reason for most of them to click through to a boiler company's blog post to read the same thing again.

The scale of this is bigger than most small business owners realise. Organic click-through rate falls from an average of 1.76% down to 0.61% when an AI Overview appears on a result, according to research from Dataslayer. That's a 61% drop in the chance someone clicks your listing, even if you're sitting in the same spot you always were.

Zoom out further and the picture gets starker. Zero-click searches, where the user gets their answer and never clicks through to any website, rose from 56% to 69% between May 2024 and May 2025, according to Similarweb data cited by Search Engine Journal. Digital Content Next, which represents around 40 premium publishers including The New York Times, Condé Nast and Vox, found median year-on-year referral traffic from Google Search down 10% across its member sites in the same period, with non-news brands down as much as 14%. That's not a niche problem affecting one industry. That's the mechanics of search changing under everyone's feet at once.

The paradox that's confusing business owners

Here's the part that catches people out. If you check your rankings, they look fine. Position 3, position 5, wherever you've always sat. Search Console shows impressions holding steady too, because your page is still being shown to Google, it's just being shown as source material for an answer the user never has to leave the results page for.

Rank position used to be a reasonably honest proxy for traffic. Higher rank, more clicks, simple. That relationship is breaking. You can now rank well, get counted as an impression, and still watch your actual visitor numbers slide, because the thing that used to guarantee a click, being the answer, is now something Google can just do itself on the page. The health metric business owners have checked for fifteen years no longer tells the whole story on its own.

What you can actually do about it

None of this means SEO is dead or that showing up in search doesn't matter any more. It means the target has shifted from "rank well" to "rank well and give people a reason to still click." Here's what that looks like in practice for a small business, not an enterprise content team with fifty writers.

1. Write to get cited inside the AI Overview itself

If you can't stop the Overview appearing, you can try to be the source it's built from. That means structuring content the way these systems like to lift from: a direct, clearly stated answer near the top of the page, in plain language, followed by the supporting detail. Use a genuine question as a subheading, then answer it in two or three sentences before you go deeper. It won't win you back the click every time, but a citation with your brand name attached still carries weight, and some of those readers will come looking for you directly later.

2. Build content an AI can't easily answer without visiting you

AI Overviews are strong at summarising existing, generic information. They're much weaker when the answer depends on something original to you: your own data, your own numbers, a tool someone has to interact with. A simple cost calculator, a survey of your own customers, a real before-and-after case study with your own figures in it, these are much harder to compress into three sentences on a results page, so they still pull genuine visits. We've written before about what this looks like when it's built properly as a system rather than one-off posts, in What AI Can Actually Build for a UK Small Business, which covers building an actual content pipeline rather than hoping individual posts land.

3. Stop measuring success by rank position alone

Open Search Console and look at impressions against clicks for your key pages, not just position. If impressions are flat or rising while clicks are falling, that page is being shown inside an AI Overview or a featured snippet and you're not getting credit for it in visits. That's a genuinely different problem to a page that's simply dropped out of favour with Google, and it needs a different fix, focused on citation and content depth rather than backlinks and keyword density.

4. Stop relying on Google as your only source of traffic

This is the least exciting piece of advice and the most important one. If a meaningful share of your traffic can evaporate because of a change in how a results page is laid out, and you have no other channel bringing people to you, that's a structural risk to the business, not just an SEO metric to fix. An email list you own, a presence on the platforms your customers actually spend time on, even direct relationships built through local partnerships, all of these matter more now than they did three years ago, precisely because they don't depend on Google deciding whether to send someone your way.

The bit worth sitting with

None of this is really about beating an algorithm. It's about accepting that "being findable" and "getting visited" have quietly become two different jobs, and most small business owners are still only doing the first one. The businesses that adjust now, by building content genuinely worth clicking through for and by not putting all their traffic eggs in one basket, are going to look a lot better positioned in twelve months than the ones still checking rank position and wondering where everyone went.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Google AI Overview?

It's an AI-generated summary that appears at the top of some Google search results, pulling together information from multiple sources into a single answer shown directly on the results page, often before any website listings.

Why is my website traffic dropping even though my rankings haven't changed?

Rankings measure where you appear, not whether anyone clicks through to you. When an AI Overview answers the query on the results page itself, people get what they need without visiting any site, so your position can stay the same while your actual visits fall.

Can I stop my content appearing in AI Overviews?

There's no reliable way to opt individual pages out while still ranking normally, though you can block AI crawlers entirely, which usually removes you from both AI Overviews and much of your organic visibility. For most small businesses, focusing on being cited well is a more practical approach than trying to opt out.

How do I check if AI Overviews are affecting my site?

In Google Search Console, compare impressions against clicks for your key pages over time. Flat or growing impressions alongside falling clicks is a strong signal that your pages are being used as source material for AI-generated answers rather than being visited directly.

What content is least affected by AI Overviews?

Content built on something original to your business, your own data, your own case studies, a calculator or tool people interact with, tends to hold up better, because an AI summary can describe it but can't fully replace the experience of using or seeing it firsthand.

If flat traffic despite steady rankings sounds familiar, this is exactly the kind of problem AIMF works through with SME clients day to day. If you'd like a second pair of eyes on your own numbers, feel free to get in touch.