Site traffic down from Google's AI? What to do now

The monthly report comes in and the site's visits chart is heading down. The site hasn't changed. Its Google ranking has barely moved. Even so, fewer people come in. In recent months, this has been one of the most frequent conversations I have with business owners.

Most of the time, the explanation sits above the first result. Google now answers many questions with an AI-written summary, AI Overviews, and since September 2025 has offered AI Mode in Portuguese in Brazil. People who read the answer there don't always need to click. In this article I show what the research measures, which pages lose the most, which hold up, and what to do on your company's site.

Do AI summaries really take clicks from your site?

They do, and there's independent data. Pew Research Center tracked the real browsing of 900 U.S. adults during March 2025, across 68,879 Google searches. The numbers:

• Clicks on a regular link: happened in 8% of visits when there was an AI summary, versus 15% when there wasn't.
• Clicks on a link cited inside the summary: just 1% of visits.
• End of browsing: 26% of people ended their session after seeing a page with an AI summary, versus 16% without one.

Clicks nearly drop by half. Ahrefs gets close by another route: comparing 300,000 keywords, its February 2026 study links AI summaries to a 58% lower click-through rate for the top result. It's correlation, not proof of cause, but the direction matches Pew's.

Not every search gets an AI summary

Here's the part few people look at. In Pew's sample, only 18% of searches showed an AI summary. And they weren't evenly spread:

• One- or two-word searches: 8% had a summary.
• Searches of ten words or more: 53% had a summary.
• Searches phrased as questions: 60% had a summary.

That changes the diagnosis. Someone typing “how to remove water stains from a wall” wants an explanation, and Google delivers it right there. Someone typing “waterproofing company” or your brand name wants a provider, and short searches rarely get a summary.

AI Mode pulls in the same direction. According to Google's announcement for Brazil, early users ask questions two to three times longer than traditional searches. The longer and more informational the question, the more likely the answer stays on Google's own page.

Which pages on your site lose the most

Put the two data points together and the map is clear. The biggest losers are pages that answer generic questions: “what is” articles, glossaries, tutorials, tip lists. They brought volume, but many of those visits would never have become customers.

The pages that hold up best serve people who have already decided to find someone: service pages, pricing or quote pages, city or neighborhood pages, case study pages, pages with the company name. These are shorter searches with intent to hire.

So the first question to ask of a falling chart is: which pages lost traffic? If the drop is all in the informational blog and quote requests keep coming at the same pace, the problem is smaller than it looks. If service pages fell too, it may be something else, like an indexing error or a new competitor. The article on why your company's site doesn't show up on Google helps rule out technical causes.

Is it worth being cited in the answer?

It is, and the numbers show how much. Seer Interactive published in April 2026 an analysis of 53 brands, nearly 5.5 million searches, and 2.43 billion impressions. On informational searches in 2025, the average organic click-through rate was:

• 3.35% when there was no AI summary;
• 2.07% when there was a summary and the brand was cited in it;
• 0.94% when there was a summary and the brand wasn't cited.

Being cited doesn't bring back the old traffic. But it doubles clicks compared with those left out. And there's an effect click-through rate doesn't measure: your brand appears in the answer the person read, as a trusted source. Remember Pew's finding that only 1% click the cited link? Part of the value of being there is recall. When the person needs to hire, they already know the name.

Seer also shows a sign of stabilization. The organic click-through rate on searches with an AI summary hit its low in December 2025, at 1.31%, and rose to 2.36% in February 2026. It's too early to say whether the rise will hold, but this isn't an endless decline.

And ads don't escape it. In the same study, in December 2025, the paid click-through rate was 15.14% on searches with an AI summary and 20.96% on searches without one. Swapping SEO for paid media doesn't solve the problem, it just moves where it shows up.

What to do on your company's site

There's no trick to get back to the 2023 chart. There is a plan that protects what matters:

1. Sort pages by intent in Search Console. Google states in its documentation on AI features that traffic from AI Overviews and AI Mode is included in the performance report, under the “Web” search type. Compare impressions and clicks for service pages and blog pages. Steady impressions with falling clicks mean something answers before you.
2. Measure contacts, not visits. Google says, in the same documentation, that clicks from pages with AI Overviews are higher quality and that people tend to spend more time on the site. If visits fell and quote requests didn't, you lost traffic that wasn't buying.
3. Strengthen your service pages. One page per service, with price or how to get a quote, timeline, area served, proof (case studies, reviews), and a short path to contact. That's the page that catches searches from people ready to hire.
4. Write to be cited. Google says there's no extra technical requirement to appear in AI Overviews: the page must be indexed and eligible to show a snippet in search. What raises your odds is answering the question right at the top, with a number, a source, and a clear sentence. The guide on how to get your company to show up in ChatGPT and Google covers this format in detail.
5. Think twice before blocking. The documentation lets you limit what Google shows with nosnippet and max-snippet. But that also cuts your snippet in regular results. For most businesses, leaving the answer means losing the shop window.

What this means for you

If you hire SEO and only measure visits, the report will get worse even when the work is done well. Change the yardstick. The right questions for whoever runs your site now are: how many contacts came from search, which AI answers mention the brand, and which service pages gained or lost ranking.

Be wary of anyone promising to bring the old traffic back. None of the research above supports that promise. What you can do is focus effort on the searches of people who buy, and make sure that, for the questions in your market, the AI answer cites you and not your competitor.

At the Studio, we start with a discovery of your site and Search Console before setting any price. The price is fixed after that discovery, and the domain, Search Console, and access stay in the client's name. If your site's traffic dropped and you want to know what still brings in customers, our SEO and GEO service to show up on Google and in AI starts right there.