AI Overviews are eating clicks. What to do about it

A pattern shows up across Search Console accounts everywhere: impressions stable, average position stable, clicks down. Nothing broke. The results page changed around you. AI Overviews now answer a growing share of searches directly at the top of the page, and a reader whose question is resolved in the summary has less reason to click anything below it.

Panic and denial are both wrong responses. The exposure is real, uneven, and it rewards a specific adjustment rather than a rebuild.

Which searches are exposed

The damage concentrates where a synthesised answer genuinely satisfies the searcher:

• Definitions and explanations. What is X, how does Y work. The Overview answers, the click dies.
• Simple how-tos and checklists. Steps that fit in a summary get summarised.
• Quick facts and thresholds. Deadlines, limits, formulas, typical costs at the vaguest level.

And it largely spares searches where the click is the point:

• Commercial and local intent. Someone hiring, buying or comparing still needs a provider, and the Overview itself tends to cite and name options rather than replace them.
• Anything requiring your specifics. Pricing for a real situation, availability, a tool, a portfolio, a booking.
• Trust-dependent decisions. People choosing where to spend serious money still click through to judge who they are dealing with.

Run the split on your own data: in Search Console, compare clicks and click-through rate year over year for your informational queries versus your commercial ones. Most sites find the bleed is concentrated in exactly the content that was always upper-funnel.

What this changes strategically

Informational content is no longer a traffic play. It is a citation play. The blog post that once earned a thousand definitional visits now earns a fraction of that, but the same content, written specifically and structured cleanly, is what AI Overviews and chat assistants quote and cite. Being the named source in the answer box is the new version of ranking for the definition. Different metric, same underlying asset.

Commercial pages matter more than ever. If the top of the funnel increasingly resolves without a click, the searches that still click, the hiring, buying, comparing ones, carry more of the load. Most sites have underinvested in exactly these pages for years while feeding the blog. Rebalance.

Measurement has to change or it will lie to you. Traffic as a headline KPI now punishes you for a platform shift you do not control. Watch impressions and citation presence for informational content, and clicks, enquiries and revenue for commercial content. And expect the strange new visitor pattern: fewer clicks, but the ones who arrive have often read a summary already and convert better. Falling traffic with stable enquiries is not a crisis; it is the funnel compressing.

What to actually do

1. Audit your exposure. Split queries by intent in Search Console and quantify where the click loss actually is. Decisions beat vibes.
2. Write for extraction on informational pages. Direct answers near the top, specific claims, clean headings, passages that survive being lifted. Vague content gets neither the click nor the citation.
3. Double down on the pages that still earn clicks. Comparison, pricing context, service and location pages, proof. This is where the remaining clicks concentrate and where they were always worth the most.
4. Track what the engines say, not just where you rank. A fixed prompt and query set, checked on a schedule, tells you whether you are the cited source or the invisible one.

The web where every question earned somebody a pageview is closing. The businesses that get hurt worst are the ones whose entire organic strategy was informational volume. The ones that barely notice are those whose sites were built around being chosen, not just found. Moving from the first group to the second is mostly reallocation, and it is very doable on purpose.