Your rankings held and your traffic fell. That's AI Overviews.

This is the most common thing business owners have brought to us this year, and it always arrives the same way: “Our traffic is down a third. Have we been penalised?”

Almost always, no. Open Search Console and you find average position is flat, impressions are flat or up, and clicks have fallen off a cliff. Nothing broke. Google started answering the question above your result, and a large share of people got what they needed without leaving the page.

What the numbers look like

The scale of this is not subtle. AI Overviews now appear on roughly half of searches. Pew Research measured the share of visits that end in a click to a website dropping from 15% to 8% when an AI Overview is present — roughly halved. Across the wider market, zero-click searches rose from 56% to 69% between May 2024 and May 2025, and smaller sites have generally been hit harder than large ones.

So the honest framing is this: impressions are no longer a proxy for attention, and clicks are no longer a proxy for influence. Both of those assumptions were baked into how most small businesses read their analytics, and both stopped holding.

First, confirm it is actually this

Do not take our word for it. Three checks, ten minutes:

• Search Console, Performance, last 16 months. Plot clicks and impressions together. If impressions hold and clicks fall, that is the signature. If both fell, you have a different problem — a ranking loss, a technical fault, or seasonality.
• Compare query types. Filter to queries containing “how”, “what” or “why”. Informational queries are where AI Overviews are densest, and where the drop will be steepest. Filter to your brand name and your town — those should be far less affected.
• Search your own top queries. Actually type them into Google. See whether an AI Overview appears, and whether you are cited inside it.

That third check matters more than people expect. Being cited inside an AI Overview has been measured as delivering around 35% more organic clicks than not being cited — nowhere near enough to restore the old numbers, but the difference between participating and being invisible.

Which pages lost, and which did not

The damage is uneven, and understanding the pattern tells you where to spend.

• Definitional and explainer pages lost the most. “What is X”, “how does Y work” — these are precisely what a generated summary answers well.
• Comparison and pricing pages held up better. People do not accept a summary when money is involved; they want to see the actual figures on the actual site.
• Local and brand queries barely moved. Somebody searching for a plumber in their town still needs a phone number, opening hours and a real business.
• Transactional pages held. Nobody buys from a summary.

If most of your traffic came from the first category, your fall will be severe. If your site is built around local intent and things people actually buy, you will have felt it far less.

What to stop doing

Two reflexes make this worse.

Do not write more of what stopped working. Publishing another twenty definitional explainers into a search surface that now answers definitional questions itself is spending money to lose.

Do not judge the whole channel on clicks alone. If clicks fell 30% but enquiries held steady, you did not lose customers — you lost the visits that were never going to buy. That is a smaller problem than the chart suggests, and possibly not a problem at all.

What to do instead

Change what you measure. Enquiries, calls and sales were always the real numbers. This is a good moment to stop reporting traffic as if it were an outcome. We wrote about which figures actually matter in the five numbers every small business should watch.

Write things a summary cannot replace. Your prices. Your process. What you did for a specific customer and what it cost. A photograph of your work. An opinion. Generated summaries are assembled from what everybody already says — the way out is to say something only you can.

Get the commercial pages right. Traffic is scarcer, so the visits you do get have to work harder. That is a conversion problem, and it is a solvable one — the anatomy of a landing page that converts is the practical version.

Take the channels you own more seriously. Email and repeat custom do not have an algorithm between you and the customer. Email was undervalued when search was cheap; it is not undervalued now.

Defend local. If you serve an area, local search is the part of this that held, and it rewards attention. Local SEO is where a small budget still goes furthest.

The uncomfortable part

Some of the traffic is not coming back. A business whose model was “rank for informational queries, convert a small percentage” has lost the top of that funnel permanently, and no amount of optimisation restores it.

That is worth saying plainly because the alternative — paying someone monthly to chase a number that structurally cannot return — is a genuinely expensive mistake. The businesses handling this well have moved their effort down the funnel, toward the searches where someone is ready to act.

If your traffic has dropped and you cannot tell whether it is this or something you can fix, we will look at your Search Console and tell you which — book a free call. If it is structural we will say so rather than sell you a recovery plan for something that has not broken. Our SEO service works on the queries that still convert.