Google AI Overviews are devouring search traffic

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As Google continues to push their “AI Overviews” (the AI snippets at the top of search results), we’re seeing a greater and greater decrease in traffic for many websites. It makes sense — if people can get the answers at the top, why should they scroll down and click on a search result?

I’ve heard about this trend from others, so let’s look at some data from a few sites that we manage.

First, here is a website in the tech space. They’ve seemingly worked hard to add more content to their site over the past year, and they’re showing up in search a lot more!

Let’s start with the “impressions” column in purple, which shows how often they show up in search results. Comparing this year to last year, they show up 1000% more often (from 13k to 135k)! That’s fantastic. However, if you look at the blue column on the left, the clicks from all of those searches only went up by about 20%.

How is that possible? It gets crazier if you look at the column on the far right, showing what their average position in a Google search is — it’s gotten better over the past year.

So they’re showing up 1000% more often, in better position, and yet only gained 20% more searches (when they should have theoretically gained 1000% more). Google AI Overviews is killing them.

We’re the same

If you look at data from the GreenMellen site, it shows the same story but from a slightly different angle:

In our case, we’ve been producing tons of content for many years, so our total impressions (purple column) hasn’t changed much. We still show up 600k+ times, but we’re now getting less than 50% as many clicks as before (from 2,140 to just 956).

What to do?

What can you do about this? Not much, at least not directly, as it’s very unlikely that this trend will reverse (and it’ll likely only get worse).

As I talked about late last year, the key is to get more people to search for YOU. People aren’t using Google as much to search for terms about your business, as they’re doing more of that with tools like ChatGPT, but they’ll still use Google to find you when they know you’re the answer that they want.

You need to be present on the social media sites where your customers spend time, show up in AI queries when people are looking for companies like yours, and simply be a company worth talking about so friends tell their friends about you. It’s not easy, but it’s your best way to try to fight back against this trend. If you need some sorting through all of this, reach out and let’s chat.

Optimizing for website traffic is dumb

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It can be tempting to try to optimize your website to get more traffic, because with all things being the same, more traffic will lead to more sales. The problem is that all things are never the same.

We’re seeing a world lately where the best optimized website and marketing plans are seeing less traffic but more sales. If you can get things more targeted, you’re far better off focusing on that than just trying to outplay Google and steal a few more clicks.

In a recent post and video on the SparkToro blog, Rand Fishkin summed this up perfectly related to differences in marketing today. He said:

“And so the big differences, two big differences. One, optimizing for traffic is straight up dumb. It it’s just a bad idea. It doesn’t make sense. And number two, the way to improve is not to get more visits to the website, which was the way that we sort of pounded on things in in 2012.

The way to improve is to improve your marketing and the experiences people have off of your website.“

That’s the key. Marketing today is about doing all of the right things off of your website, so that when people visit your site they’re already on your side.

Customers are increasingly doing their research on other places (social media, ChatGPT, in-person conversations, etc) and then searching for you specifically on Google and pulling up your site near the end of their research journey. Your website is still a vitally important piece of this process, but it’s not the starting point and “more traffic!” shouldn’t be your top goal.

What should the top goal be for your business? It varies for everyone, but reach out if you’d like to talk through it a bit.

What caused the conversion?

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Determining where traffic to your website really came from is becoming more and more difficult. It you just look at the last touch, it’ll lie to you and often say it was Google. That’s technically accurate, but misses much of the story.

A recent episode of the Exit Five podcast unpacked this a bit, and started with the same general premise. Here is the bit that stood out to me:

“I clicked on a Google ad and then I converted does not mean that the Google ad caused the conversion. It’s a very simple concept. But for whatever reason, this is hard for people to really internalize. So the real question is, what happened to inspire that Google search in the first place? And that is the inherent problem with click attribution and touch attribution. It assumes that whatever that click was has a cause and effect relationship with your conversion.”

It’s important to see this from both sides. As shared above, you need to be careful not to give too much credit to the last touch, as the pieces that came before it are what made it possible. However, without the last touch leading to your website, that user’s last touch would have likely gone somewhere else instead.

Click attribution is a dying metric as we move increasingly into a zero-click world, but you need to continue to push hard on your marketing to continue to draw users in even if that attribution is tough to precisely nail down.

Traffic to your home page is rising

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I talk a good bit on here about how Google is sending less traffic to most websites, and that more of the traffic they send is from branded searches (people searching specifically for your company). That’s all true, but the combination of those two things is leading to something interesting.

In many cases, while overall traffic from Google is fading, they’re actually sending more traffic to your home page. Getting less of the traditional SEO searches means less traffic to internal pages, but branded searches almost always lead to your home page. This video from Rand Fishkin explains more.

For real?

It sounded good in theory, but I wanted to see for myself. I checked out a handful of our client’s sites to compare the past 365 days against the 365 days before that, and here’s what I found:

  • One was down 15% in overall Google traffic, but home page traffic was up 4%.
  • Another was down 15% in overall Google traffic, but home page traffic was up 174%!
  • Another was down 39% in overall Google traffic, but home page traffic was up 4%.

We certainly had some that were up in both a few down in both, but the trend was very clear — overall traffic from Google is down, but traffic to the home page is up.

Not good

Ultimately this is kind of a bad thing. Traffic coming to your home page isn’t something to avoid, but traffic that comes to a specific sub-page is usually better targeted. Rather than getting an overview of what you do, they’re getting details on a specific service that you offer.

Home pages have always been the most popular pages on any site, but the trend seems to be pushing further in that direction. Are you seeing similar stats with your site?

Burning the Library of Alexandria to the ground

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The rapid decline in the quality of Google search has been both frustrating and sad. They did a rather good job for about 25 years, and now the quality has fallen off a cliff. What happened? AI is certainly part of the blame, but a bigger reason for the decline is quite a bit more sinister.

Last year, Ed Zitron wrote a fantastic article titled “The Man Who Killed Google Search“, where he places the blame squarely on one person: Prabhakar Raghavan.

The article unpacks the full story, but Raghavan pushed to make ads feel more like organic results, and removed helpful features from Google such as “turning off spell correction, turning off ranking improvements, or placing refinements — effectively labels — all over the page“.

In order to give Raghavan the power to do these things, Google had to force out Ben Gomes, who by all accounts was a fantastic and honorable man. Among other things in the article, they shared:

  • “Ben Gomes is a hero. He was instrumental in making search work, both as a product and a business, joining the company in 1999 — a time long before Google established dominance in the field.”
  • “Every single article I’ve read about Gomes’ tenure at Google spoke of a man deeply ingrained in the foundation of one of the most important technologies ever made, who had dedicated decades to maintaining a product with a — to quote Gomes himself — ‘guiding light of serving the user and using technology to do that.'”

Ultimately, it’s sent Google in a horrible direction. Perhaps they’ll recover, perhaps not, but much damage has been done. To close, and bring the title of this post back in, I’ll share one last quote from the article (which you really should go read):

“Raghavan and his cronies worked to oust Ben Gomes, a man who dedicated a good portion of his life to making the world’s information more accessible, in the process burning the Library of Alexandria to the ground so that Sundar Pichai could make more than 200 million dollars a year.”

Last touch attribution will lie to you

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In the world of marketing, “last touch attribution” is very popular. It essentially says that no matter what a potential customer does before they find you, the last thing is all that really matters.

For example, if someone sees a great video that you posted, then connects with you on LinkedIn, then listens to your podcast, and then clicks over to a blog on your site, and then contacts you to start an engagement, the blog post receives 100% of the credit for that transaction. This is both understandable and problematic.

It’s understandable because some of those touchpoints are invisible to us. We don’t generally know who specifically watched a video or listened to an episode of a podcast, so we can’t directly attribute those anyhow.

It’s problematic because the last touch likely only happened because of the previous touches.

Blumer CPAs

I’ve shared the story of Jason Blumer and his CPA firm before, but it’s worth sharing again now because it illustrates this perfectly. We’re a happy client of his, and here is how we found him (over the course of around five years):

  • We heard him speak at a conference.
  • We subscribed to his blog.
  • We subscribed to his podcast.
  • We connected with him on LinkedIn (where he shares great stuff).
  • We Googled his company so we could reach out to become a client of his.

If they used last touch attribution they’d say “Ah-ha! Mickey found us through Google, so that’s what we need to invest more in. More SEO, more ads, more Google.“

It’s technically true, but it misses the point. We indeed searched Google to find him, but it was because of his speaking, his blogging, his podcast, his LinkedIn content and things like that. Without those efforts, we never would have searched for him.

If he were to change tack and stop everything to focus on Google (because that’s what “worked”), he’d lose.

That’s not to say that working to improve your Google standing is a bad thing, for sure. That’s a key part of marketing and shouldn’t be ignored. However, while Google still drives most of the traffic on the internet, the vast majority of it is for branded searches because people already know what they’re looking for.

Pay attention to the last touches that lead customers to you, but don’t skip all of the others or you’re likely to make some bad decisions.

Informational keywords don’t help your business

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The world of search engine optimization has been changing dramatically over the past few years, and you can find many of those changes in my SEO category of posts. However, there are still some fundamental truths that people often miss.

A big one is around keyword targeting. The goal is often to get “more traffic”, but a better approach is to get “good traffic”. The mistake I see is when companies work to rank well for informational terms that won’t lead to new customers — it brings traffic to the site, but sales don’t come with it.

For example, if you’re an HVAC company you might try to rank for the phrase “why don’t they still use freon in air conditioners?“. It’s a good question, and might get some good traffic, but who is asking it? It’s unlikely to be someone looking for help right away, and more likely just a general query. You’ll get traffic from it, but it won’t help your bottom line.

Correcting this mistake often leads to a weird result — you’ll get less traffic on your site, but more revenue. Getting better traffic to your site can lead to more sales, even if the overall volume of traffic is down a bit. Rand Fishkin recently shared a great “5-Minute Whiteboard” video that unpacked this further, and I encourage you to check it out.

Traffic from those informational keywords isn’t hurting you, but it’s giving you weird data and isn’t supporting your goals. Focus instead on terms that convert and you may seen the fun mix of traffic dipping and revenue rising, which is ultimately your main goal anyhow.

Google only uses 20% of your links

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When Google first came on the scene back in 1998, their big innovation that changed the world was simply looking at website links. If a site had more links pointing toward it, then Google gave it more credit and it ranked higher. It was a simple but brilliant insight that made Google search far better than any of their competitors.

As a result, though, companies quickly started trying to game the system and get more links pointing to their site. I’ve shared thoughts on links going back almost 17 years (like this), but things have changed a lot since then.

In a recent episode of the Duct Tape Marketing show, they had Bruce Clay (the “Father of Search Engine Optimization”) on to discuss the state of SEO and AI here in 2025. Bruce had a lot of great insights, but one thing really stood out to me. To paraphrase what he said:

“Google only counts your best links, so getting more links is usually a waste. I think that Google only uses 20% of your links.”

These are merely guesses from Bruce, but I suspect that Bruce would be able to guess that type of thing more accurately than virtually anyone.

The lesson is pretty simple — don’t waste your time building links. Our agency had a service to help clients gain links a long time ago, but we stopped that practice many years back. Producing great content is always one of the best things you can do, and spending time to be where your clients are (often on social media) should be right up there as well.

As for link building, it’s time to give that up and focus on what really matters. Check out that full podcast episode for more.

Duplicate content is a good thing

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Around a decade ago, I shared some thoughts on how Google handles duplicate content. In short, while duplicate content generally wasn’t really a good thing, there wasn’t a penalty associated with it or anything. We encouraged people to avoid publishing duplicate content, but it wasn’t a huge deal.

These days things have flipped, and duplicate content can be very helpful.

This video from Rand Fishkin explains what I mean. He shares how he frequently uses the same chunk of text along with the name of his company, and as a result the AI tools are always surfacing his company for that very specific phrase.

In particular, he points out his profile on his website, and how when he speaks at events he always encourages those events to use this profile word-for-word. Included in it is a little blurb about his company, including the words “SparkToro, makers of fine audience research software“. Sure enough, if you go to your AI tool of choice and search for things related to finding “audience research software”, SparkToro usually comes up.

Here’s what I see in ChatGPT:

As Rand points out, though, if you search for phrases around “audience research tools” (which is essentially the same phrase), he doesn’t come up at all. AI tools don’t care as much about synonyms as Google does, and they’re just pattern matching words. This means two things:

  • The specific words that you use to describe your company are very important.
  • Once you’ve decided on the words, getting that text published far and wide will be of great benefit to you.

The second bullet is much easier said than done. Publish blog posts, repost on other platforms like Substack and Medium, share frequently on social media, appear on podcasts, use a PR firm to help get published in other places, etc. The more you get it out there, the more the AI tools will pick up on it.

Then, when people are using those AI tools to do research about companies like yours, you just might be the result that is shown.

Check out Rand’s full (3 minute) video for more.

Where do your customers form their opinions?

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Google is increasingly becoming a place where people go to find a specific website or company, but not where their journey really begins — it’s more often where their journey ends. However, the data can make this seem a little confusing.

As shared by Rand Fishkin, this chart shows which sites drive the most traffic on the web:

Looking at that, it seems that you should really be investing in getting more traffic from Google. However, that chart is a bit misleading because it simply shows where people come from, but not what motivated the words in their search.

Rand goes on to share this chart, which shows where people spend their time online:

You can see that search is just a tiny piece of that (10.25%). Your customers are on those other sites, where they learn about you and your industry, read reviews, talk with others, and form their opinion on next steps. Once that opinion is formed, they often head to Google to navigate to your website (or the site of your competitor).

Google shouldn’t be ignored, but the data you see for traffic coming to your site likely isn’t really showing what leads people to find you in the first place.