Google AI Overviews are devouring search traffic

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: