Sat in on a webinar about Google's new AI overviews last Thursday

The presenter showed how it dropped a client's organic traffic by 40% in just a few days. Have any of you seen a similar hit from those overviews taking over search results?

3 comments

3 Comments

jakeb813d ago

Did you see the same thing happen with your clients? We had a niche site lose about 35% of its search traffic in a week after those AI blurbs started showing up for half our main terms. It's brutal watching those overviews just eat the clicks like that.

murphy.tessa3d ago

Funny you mention "just eat the clicks" @jakeb81 because that's exactly what I'm seeing but with a twist. The overviews aren't just stealing traffic equally, they're straight up grabbing the question-based queries like "how to fix X" while leaving alone the transactional ones like "buy X near me" or "best X for price." So if your clients stuff their content with those "how" headings, they're getting wrecked while the comparison pages stay afloat. It's like the overviews are picky eaters, they grab the easy stuff and leave the hard selling for us.

corap213d ago

My friend runs a little recipe blog on the side and she messaged me two weeks ago freaking out. She had a post about "how to fix lumpy gravy" that was pulling in like 500 visits a day from search, nothing huge but steady. Then the AI overview kicked in and that page dropped to like 40 visits overnight. But her "best gravy boat for under 20 bucks" post actually went up a little. It's weird, the overviews just scoop up the question-based stuff and leave the buying guides alone. She's been rewriting all her old "how to" posts into more specific product roundups now, just trying to survive it.