Google AI Overviews Are Taking Your Clicks: What to Do Now

There's a pattern a lot of businesses are noticing in Search Console right now. Rankings look more or less the same as last year. Impressions are fine, sometimes higher. But clicks have been sliding, slowly, month after month, and nobody can quite explain why.

Usually nothing is wrong with the website. What's changed is the top of Google's results page.

For a lot of searches, Google now shows an AI Overview: a written summary that answers the question right there, above the normal links. For many people that summary is enough. They read it, get what they needed, and never scroll down to your page.

You can't switch it off. But you can change where you stand in it.

Which searches lose the most clicks

AI Overviews show up mostly on informational searches, the "what is", "how to", "difference between", "eligibility for" kind. If a big chunk of your traffic comes from blog posts answering those questions, that's very likely where the clicks went.

Searches where someone wants to act are hit much less. "Book a physiotherapy appointment near me" or "MBA admission 2027 fees" still send people through to websites, because they're trying to do something, not just learn something.

So the first step is just to look. In Search Console, compare clicks for your top pages this quarter against the same quarter last year and sort by the biggest drops. A pattern usually shows up quickly in the type of page that's losing.

Aim to be cited, not skipped

AI Overviews usually link to the pages they pulled information from. Being one of those sources is the new version of ranking first. Your brand appears inside the answer, in front of everyone who reads it.

The pages that get cited tend to answer the question early, in the first couple of sentences under a heading, with the context coming afterwards. Their headings sound like real questions ("What is the eligibility for an MBA?" rather than "Eligibility Overview"). They include specifics like numbers, dates and steps, because vague writing gives AI nothing to quote. They're easy to scan, with short paragraphs and tables where a comparison makes sense. And they're current. Pages that are obviously out of date get passed over.

Put more effort into pages people still click

If informational traffic keeps shrinking, shift some of your energy to the pages people still visit: service pages, location pages, pricing and fees, comparisons, case studies, "how to choose" guides.

They'll never pull the traffic a popular explainer once did. But the people who land there are ready to enquire, and personally I'd take 200 of those over 2,000 casual readers any day.

Start measuring differently

If you judge SEO only by clicks, the next year is going to look worse than it really is. Start paying attention to enquiries and conversions from organic search, not just sessions. Watch branded searches too, people typing your name directly, which often go up when you're being cited in AI answers. And every few weeks, manually check whether you appear in the AI Overview for your most important searches. A business can lose a fifth of its clicks and still get more enquiries, if the clicks it keeps are the right ones.

This isn't only about Google

AI Overviews are just one piece. People are asking ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity the same questions. The brands that adapt early, writing content that's easy to quote and building a reputation AI can trust, will hold their ground. The ones still publishing the same old style of blog posts will keep watching that click graph go down.