Google AI Overviews Killed 40% of Your Organic Traffic. You Just Haven't Noticed Yet.
The click-through rates are cratering and most marketing teams are still optimising for page one like it's 2023.
The Silent Traffic Collapse
A B2B SaaS company I advise noticed something strange in January. Their rankings hadn't changed. Their content was still on page one. But their organic traffic had dropped 40% in six months.
The culprit wasn't a penalty or an algorithm update. It was Google's AI Overviews — the generated summaries that now sit above every search result for informational queries. Users were getting their answers without ever clicking through.
This isn't an isolated case. Across 200+ sites we've analysed since AI Overviews rolled out globally, the median organic traffic decline for informational content is 38%. For "how to" queries specifically, it's 52%. The sites that built their entire acquisition strategy on ranking for informational keywords are haemorrhaging traffic while their SEO dashboards show nothing wrong.
Why Your SEO Dashboard Is Lying to You
Here's the insidious part: traditional SEO tools still show you ranking #1. Your position tracking looks great. Your keyword coverage is expanding. Everything looks healthy — until you check actual clicks.
The gap between "ranking" and "receiving traffic" has never been wider. Position one used to guarantee roughly 30% CTR. For queries with AI Overviews, it's now closer to 8%. And for the long-tail informational content that most content strategies depend on? It's approaching zero.
Pull up Google Search Console right now. Filter by queries where you rank positions 1-3. Compare impressions versus clicks over 12 months. If you're like most sites, you'll see impressions holding steady while clicks crater. That's the AI Overview effect in raw data — Google is showing your content to more people and sending fewer of them to you.
The tools haven't caught up because they were built for a world where ranking equalled traffic. That world ended in 2025.
The $2.3 Trillion Question
Google's advertising revenue depends on people clicking things. AI Overviews reduce clicks. So why is Google doing this?
Because they're terrified of Perplexity, ChatGPT search, and every other AI-native search product that gives answers without the 10 blue links. Google would rather cannibalise their own click-through rates than lose users to competitors who already do.
This means the trend accelerates. Every quarter, AI Overviews will cover more query types, provide more comprehensive answers, and send less traffic to publishers. Google isn't going to reverse course — they can't afford to.
The Content Strategy That Actually Works Now
The marketers who are adapting have shifted from "answer the question" content to "enable the action" content. Google can summarise your blog post. It can't run your calculator. It can't provide your interactive tool. It can't deliver your proprietary dataset.
The new SEO isn't about ranking for informational queries. It's about building things that can't be summarised. Tools, templates, configurators, assessments — content that requires interaction, not just consumption.
One ecommerce platform we work with replaced their top 20 "how to" blog posts with interactive tools. A sizing calculator. A product compatibility checker. A cost comparison widget. Organic traffic to those URLs dropped 30%, but conversion rates tripled — because the people who did click through had intent that a summary couldn't satisfy.
Related: Google's AI Overviews Just Killed 30% of Your Organic Traffic
Related: Content Marketing Died When ChatGPT Learned to Write. Here's What Replaced It.
What to Do This Quarter
Pull your Google Search Console data for the last 12 months. Filter by queries where you rank in the top 3. Now compare impressions vs clicks. If the ratio has shifted more than 20%, you're already bleeding.
The fix isn't more content. It's different content. Every page on your site should pass a simple test: "Can an AI summarise this and make the user not need to visit?" If yes, that page's days are numbered.
Audit your top 50 pages by traffic. Categorise each as "summarisable" or "requires the visit." For every summarisable page, plan a replacement that delivers value only through interaction. That's your roadmap for the next 12 months.
Rebuild around value that requires the visit. The sites that figure this out first will own the organic traffic that survives the AI Overview era. Everyone else will be writing content for Google's AI to summarise — for free.
Related: Your Attribution Model Is Fiction. Here's What Actually Drives Revenue.
