A strange pattern is showing up in analytics this year: rankings holding, impressions even growing, and fewer people clicking through.
The first instinct is that something broke on the site. Usually nothing did. What changed is Google’s results page.
What happened to the results page
Google now writes an AI answer (AI Overviews) at the top of many searches, directly on the results page. There is also a separate conversational entry point called AI Mode — at Google I/O this May, Google’s own numbers were a billion monthly users, with query volume roughly doubling every quarter.
The consequence is blunt: the answer is delivered on the results page, so there is no reason left to click anything. The firms that measure search traffic have converged on similar figures this year: when an AI answer appears, click-through on the first organic result drops by around a fifth, and informational searches — how-to, what-is, which-is-better — are sending 30–40% less traffic to websites.
In other words, “ranking first” is worth less than it was. The position is still there. The clicks are not.
Confirm this is what you have
Open Search Console and compare the last three months against the same period last year, watching three numbers: impressions, clicks, average position.
Impressions steady or up, position unchanged, only clicks falling — that is this. Your page is still shown; there is simply an AI answer sitting on top of it now.
Impressions and clicks falling together — different problem. That is rankings or indexing, nothing to do with AI; this piece covers how to work through it.
Telling these apart matters. We have seen the first treated as the second: a full site rebuild, after which traffic naturally still did not return, because the site was never the problem.
Which searches are hit, and which barely are
Informational searches are hit hardest. The awkward part: that is exactly the content-marketing playbook of the past decade — writing “how to choose” and “what is” to accumulate traffic and trust. The traffic half of that path is closing.
Three kinds of search are affected far less:
Local. “Near me” and “in Auckland” searches still return the map and the business listings, and people still click them.
Transactional. Getting a quote, making a booking, placing an order. AI can help compare, but the transaction still happens on your website or your phone line. It can answer “how to choose a renovation company”; the customer still has to hire one.
Brand. People who already know your name go straight to you, same as ever.
Hold your own business against that list. If your customers are local and your work closes through quotes and conversations, this shift hurts you far less than the headlines suggest. The heaviest damage lands on content sites that live off informational traffic — not on companies that do work for clients.
What to keep writing, and what to stop expecting
Stop expecting generic tutorials to bring traffic. Most readers of “how to do X” now stop at the AI answer. But that content did not become useless — its job changed. AI assembles its answers from sources it considers credible, so the point of writing it shifts from earning clicks to being the source that gets restated. Keep writing it; stop measuring it in traffic.
Write more decision-stage content. Prices, scope, “what we do and don’t do”, real client work. This is what people verify after the AI has given them the general picture, right before committing — the strongest click intent there is, and the hardest thing for a summary to replace.
Put verifiable facts on the page. Actual prices, service boundaries, address, founding date. It serves both audiences at once: humans convert on it, AI cites it.
Being cited is the new ranking
Once the results page works this way, the metric worth chasing changes too: not “what position am I in” but “am I in the answer”. First place gets no click, but when the AI’s answer names you or cites your page, the customer arrives already carrying your name.
You can test this yourself with no tools; we wrote up the method in how to check whether AI recommends your business, and the thinking behind it in what is GEO.
A realistic judgement
Traffic was never the goal; enquiries are. Someone who read the AI summary and clicked through anyway is usually closer to buying than someone who clicked casually — smaller numbers, better quality. So change what you watch from “how many visited” to “how many enquired”, and stop worrying over a metric that is being devalued.
As for whether to overhaul the site: if clicks are down but enquiries are not, leave it alone. Filling in the decision-stage content and the verifiable facts above will do far more than a rebuild.
Our SEO and GEO service works both layers: keeping Google putting you near the top, and getting AI to mention you in its answers. One look at your Search Console data shows which layer needs the work.