Your website is losing clicks to AI — here's what actually helps

If you've looked at your website traffic lately and wondered why the numbers are drifting down, you're not imagining it. Google's AI Overviews — the AI-generated answer box that now shows up at the top of a lot of searches — is changing how people get information, and it's pulling clicks away from the websites that used to get them.

The good news: this mostly hits informational searches, not the "I'm ready to buy" searches. The bad news: a lot of the content small businesses have been told to write for the last decade was informational. That's the stuff AI Overviews summarizes and keeps.

What the data actually shows

When an AI Overview appears, clicks to the top organic result drop by roughly 30–60%, depending on the study. Ahrefs put the informational- query drop at about 33%. Transactional queries ("plumber near me", "custom cabinets Laval") barely budged — about 9.5%.

Separately, seoClarity looked at where AI Overviews tend to show up and found they hit informational intent around 84% of the time. Google's own framing from Danny Sullivan, paraphrased: AI helps people when they're researching, and gets in the way when they're ready to buy.

For a local business owner, that's actually useful news. The searches that turn into paying customers — the near-me, "open now", "quote for X" kind — are the ones least disrupted. The searches most affected are the generic "what is X" blog-fodder queries. If your traffic was mostly those, it was never going to pay the rent anyway.

What this means for your site

Three shifts worth making, in order of impact:

1. Prioritize the pages that sell. Your services pages, your booking or quote page, your "service areas we cover" page. These are the transactional pages — treat them like storefronts, not afterthoughts. Clear titles, clear prices (or clear pricing logic), clear CTA, fast load. If someone lands there from a local search, they should be able to book or call in under 10 seconds.

2. Make sure AI engines can quote you. When someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity "best plumber in Laval," the models pick citations from sites they can parse quickly. That means clean HTML, a sensible site structure, and a plain-English llms.txt file at the root of your site. Schema markup (the invisible JSON tags that tell search engines "this is a business, here are the hours, here's the phone number") helps too — not because it makes you rank higher, but because it makes you easier to cite correctly.

3. Stop writing blog posts that are summaries of other people's blog posts. If your content is the kind of thing an AI can confidently answer from its training data, AI will answer it — and nobody will click through. The content that still earns clicks is either (a) specific to your business, area, or customers, or (b) original enough that people want to read the whole thing, not a summary.

What this doesn't mean

It doesn't mean SEO is dead. It doesn't mean you should panic and hire someone to "optimize for AI" for $2,000 a month. Google still sends most of the traffic to most local businesses. Most of the sky-is-falling headlines you've seen are selling something.

What it means is that the rules tilted. Sites that were already doing the boring stuff — fast, honest, useful, local — are barely affected. Sites that were getting by on fluff are the ones bleeding clicks.

If you want us to look at yours and tell you which category it falls into, that's what we do. No pitch deck, no jargon, no $2,000 retainer. Just a straight answer.