The Short Answer
Why is my website traffic dropping? It’s one of the most common questions businesses are asking right now. Your website traffic is probably down because search itself has changed. Google’s AI Overviews now answer questions directly on the results page, which means fewer people click through to websites even when those websites rank well. Almost every industry is seeing the same pattern, and most of the time it’s got nothing to do with anything you changed on your end.
There are things you can do about it. Just probably not the ones you’ve been told to do.
What’s Actually Happening to Search Right Now
The numbers made us do a double-take when we first pulled them.
Bain & Company research puts zero-click searches at 60% of all Google searches now. On mobile, that jumps to 77%. And when an AI Overview sits at the top of the results (which happens constantly now), Seer Interactive analysed 25 million impressions and found organic click-through rates dropped by 61%. We actually re-read that one to check we weren’t misinterpreting it.
Here’s what those numbers actually mean day-to-day. The same person who’d have clicked through to your website a year ago is now reading Google’s AI summary and closing the tab. They got what they came for. They just got it without visiting anyone.
The change is called “zero-click search,” and it’s been building for years. Featured snippets started the trend. Knowledge panels accelerated it. AI Overviews have pushed it into a whole new league.
Why Your Rankings Look Fine But Your Traffic Doesn’t
This part confused a lot of our clients before we explained it properly.
You can rank #1 for a search term and get less traffic than you did when you ranked #5 two years ago. Because the layout above your link has completely changed. An AI Overview might now sit at the very top of the page. Below that, sponsored results. Below those, a “People Also Ask” box. By the time someone scrolls down to the first organic result (you), they might have already gotten their answer from the AI summary.
A single documented case from the research showed a website’s impressions climbing 27% year-over-year while actual clicks dropped 36% (Dataslayer). Same rankings. Better visibility metrics. Fewer visitors. That pattern is now everywhere.
If you’ve been staring at Search Console wondering why impressions look stable but sessions are sliding, that’s almost certainly what’s happening to you.
Is This Only Affecting Certain Industries?
Every industry is seeing some version of this, but the severity varies wildly.
Informational content is getting absolutely hammered. The how-to articles, the definitions, the explainers. Exactly the content AI Overviews can summarise without needing to send anyone anywhere. Ahrefs reports AI Overviews now appear on 99.9% of informational keywords. If your blog traffic was mostly driven by “what is X” or “how to do Y” queries, the damage has probably been brutal.
Transactional searches, local searches, and navigational searches have held up much better. Someone searching for an emergency plumber in their area is going to click through. Someone searching for a specific brand name is going to click through. But ask Google what causes a leaky faucet and the answer gets served up right there on the page.
The worst-hit verticals so far have been science, health, pets, and general knowledge content. The most protected: shopping, real estate, sports, and news. Anything where the searcher needs to see options, compare prices, or get recent updates still drives clicks.
What You Should Actually Do About It
This is the part where most articles we’ve read get weirdly hand-wavy. Here’s the honest answer based on what we’re doing with our own clients.
Start by changing what you’re actually measuring. Traffic as your primary metric made sense back when clicks and impressions moved together. Those two numbers have since decoupled. You could be looking at climbing impressions and falling sessions at the same time, which means your visibility is probably growing even while your analytics dashboard paints a disaster. More useful things to watch now: branded search volume (are more people typing your company name into Google?), conversion rate per visit (are the people who DO land on your site more qualified than before?), and whether AI tools like Perplexity or ChatGPT are citing you when someone asks about your category.
The content itself also has to change. Articles that answer a question in 200 words will get eaten by AI Overviews, end of story. What still earns clicks is content that can’t be summarised cleanly: original data, client case studies you actually ran, strong opinions, detailed frameworks, insider perspectives nobody else has. We’ve been gradually restructuring client content around this principle and the traffic patterns on those restructured pieces are visibly healthier than the ones still written in the old explainer style.
Getting cited inside AI Overviews is a separate game entirely from ranking on Google, and it’s becoming essential. The overlap between top-10 Google rankings and AI Overview citations has collapsed from 75% in mid-2025 to between 17% and 38% by early 2026 (Mersel). So ranking first doesn’t get you into the AI answer anymore. This is where GEO (generative engine optimisation) comes in, and we covered it in depth in our AI search post.
Then there’s the piece most businesses have under-invested in: channels you actually own. Email lists. Newsletters. Private communities. LinkedIn if your audience actually lives there. The traffic you own isn’t subject to algorithm changes or AI Overview rollouts. Most of the clients we’ve taken on recently had put this off for years and are now scrambling to catch up.
Finally, when you’re picking what content to create next, bias toward formats that still drive clicks. Deep comparison pieces, product-specific articles, local content, case studies with real numbers. These force engagement because AI summaries genuinely can’t replicate them well enough to satisfy the searcher.
What Not to Do
A few reflexes we see businesses falling into that make the situation worse.
The first one is publishing more content faster to compensate for the drop. Usually with AI-generated filler to keep pace. This strategy puts you in direct competition with AI Overviews, which are themselves AI-generated summaries pulling from existing content. You lose that fight every time. The businesses surviving this shift are publishing less but making each piece genuinely harder to summarise away.
There’s also a weirdly popular piece of advice floating around that suggests you should strip your content down into crisp, simple answers so AI systems cite you more often. The logic sounds reasonable. The outcome isn’t. Simpler content summarises more cleanly, which means users get the answer from the AI Overview and never visit you. You’ve optimised your way into being quoted without being visited.
Another trap: assuming something on your end broke. We had a client a few weeks ago who was absolutely convinced a technical SEO issue was the reason for their decline. They wanted a full audit. We spent a chunk of an afternoon digging through crawl errors, Core Web Vitals, redirect chains, the whole technical layer. Everything checked out. Their traffic was dropping for the same reason basically every other business’s was.
Last one: stop measuring success against your 2022 traffic numbers. That baseline doesn’t exist anymore. Search itself has restructured, and chasing a metric from an earlier era of the internet will frustrate you into making bad decisions. Smaller volumes of better-qualified traffic are often more valuable for the business than the higher volumes were two years ago.
What Salty Lavender Does About This for Our Clients
We’ve quietly rebuilt how we approach content and SEO strategy because of this exact shift. We track AI citations across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini alongside traditional rankings. We structure content to be un-summarisable where possible. We prioritise owned channels in the broader marketing mix. And we talk honestly with clients about the fact that the old traffic-first playbook doesn’t work anymore.
If your traffic has been sliding and the usual “fix your SEO” advice hasn’t done anything, the issue is probably structural rather than technical. Happy to talk through what that actually looks like for your business.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is my website traffic dropping because I did something wrong?
No, almost certainly not. Something like nine out of ten sites we audit these days are fine technically. The reason this question comes up constantly is that analytics dashboards make it feel personal, like you must have broken something. The data tells a different story. When organic click-through rates on AI Overview queries have dropped 61% across basically every industry, you’re not staring at a you problem. You’re staring at a search problem. Still worth a quick sanity check for anything obvious on the technical side, but the site itself is usually not the issue.
How do I know if AI Overviews are causing my traffic drop specifically?
Pop open Google Search Console. Look at the last 12 months of impressions vs clicks. The fingerprint of AI Overview compression is pretty specific: impressions holding steady or climbing, but clicks falling, and your average position hasn’t actually dropped. That’s the pattern. A technical issue would normally drag impressions down with the clicks. The decoupling between the two is what gives AI Overviews away.
Should I just stop worrying about SEO then?
Don’t. SEO still matters, it just means something different now than it did three years ago. Queries that still drive clicks (transactional, local, navigational, and specific product searches) respond to traditional SEO roughly the way they always have. The new layer is AI citation visibility, which runs on a completely separate set of rules and can’t be ignored. Giving up on SEO is the wrong call. So is treating it like it’s 2022.
How long will this keep getting worse?
Hard to say exactly. Most analysts we’ve read think zero-click rates will keep creeping toward 70% of all queries before things stabilise. There’s no obvious reason the trend would reverse in the near term, because Google has every incentive to keep users on Google. What’s shifting faster than the zero-click numbers is how businesses are responding: measuring success differently, building content AI can’t easily summarise away, investing in channels they actually own. That adaptation is where the real story is.
What’s one thing I can do this week to start adapting?
Go into your analytics and identify your top five informational pages by traffic. The ones answering “what is X” or “how do you Y” questions. Pick three of those and genuinely rework them. Add original data if you have any. Drop in a client story with specific details. Take a strong opinion on something most articles on the same topic tiptoe around. The goal is content that reads like it came from a specific human with specific experience rather than content that could be rewritten by any AI in thirty seconds. That reworking exercise alone tends to pull click-through rates back up within a few weeks.
