SEO
Google AI Overviews: Why Your Website Traffic Dropped and What To Do About It
If your website traffic has fallen over the past year and your rankings look fine, the most likely culprit is Google's AI Overviews. These are the AI-written answers that now sit at the top of most search results, and they answer the searcher's question before anyone clicks a link.
The effect is measurable. Studies of affected queries have documented organic click-through drops of between 15% and 61% where an AI Overview appears, and in 2026 they show on the majority of search results pages.
The good news, especially if you are a local business in South Wales, is that you are partly insulated, and there are practical moves that recover visibility. Here is how to confirm what happened and what to do about it.
What are AI Overviews and why do they cut your clicks?
AI Overviews are Google's generated summaries. When someone searches "how often should gutters be cleaned" or "what is business interruption insurance", Google writes a direct answer at the top of the page, stitched together from websites it trusts, with small citation links tucked alongside.
The searcher gets what they came for without visiting anyone. Google keeps the visit, your site loses the click, and the content you paid to have written does its job for free.
This is not a penalty and it is not something you did wrong. Sites with perfectly healthy rankings are losing traffic simply because the result page changed shape. Informational content, the classic "helpful blog post", is hit hardest. Commercial and local searches are hit far less, and we will come back to why that matters.
How do I check if AI Overviews have hit my site?
You do not need paid tools. Google Search Console tells you in about five minutes.
- Open Search Console and go to the Performance report.
- Set the date range to the last six months and compare it with the previous six months.
- Look at impressions and clicks side by side.
The signature pattern is unmistakable: impressions flat or rising, clicks falling, average position roughly unchanged. Your pages are still being shown and still ranking. People just are not clicking, because the AI summary above you already answered them.
Then switch to the Queries tab and sort by click change. If the biggest losers are question-style searches ("how to", "what is", "why does") while searches containing your brand name or your town are steady, you are looking at an AI Overviews story, not a rankings problem.
Worth ruling out the other suspects while you are in there. A sudden cliff-edge drop on a specific date usually means a technical problem or a Google algorithm update, and falling impressions alongside falling clicks points to genuine ranking losses. The slow, steady divergence of impressions and clicks over months is the AI Overviews signature. Different causes need completely different fixes, so this ten minutes of diagnosis matters.
Key takeaway: falling clicks with stable rankings is not an SEO failure, it is a changed results page. Diagnose before you spend a penny fixing the wrong thing. We have seen businesses pay for "recovery audits" they never needed.
Why are local businesses partly protected?
Here is the genuinely reassuring part for most of our clients. When someone searches "accountant Cardiff", "emergency plumber Newport" or "dog groomer Pontypridd", they do not want an essay. They want a business, a phone number and some reviews.
Google knows this, so local-intent searches still lead with the map pack: the block of three local businesses with reviews, opening hours and directions. AI Overviews appear far less often on these searches, and when they do, they sit alongside local results rather than replacing them.
A Cardiff client of ours, a specialist trades firm, lost around a third of their blog traffic over twelve months. Their enquiries barely moved. Why? Because the enquiries never came from the blog. They came from the map pack, their reviews and searches with clear local intent. The traffic they lost was traffic that was never going to buy.
That is the lens to apply to your own numbers. Losing readers is not the same as losing customers. Work out which one actually happened to you before deciding anything.
How do you get cited inside AI answers?
You cannot opt out of AI Overviews appearing, but you can compete to be one of the sources they cite. Cited links still earn clicks, and being quoted as the authority carries its own weight. Three things consistently help.
1. Structure your content so a machine can lift answers from it
Use clear question-style headings with a direct answer in the first sentence or two beneath them. Add FAQ sections with proper FAQ schema markup. Keep one idea per section. AI systems cite content they can extract cleanly.
2. Publish genuine first-hand expertise
Generic overviews are exactly what the AI writes itself, so it has no reason to cite yours. What it cannot generate is your experience: real project photos, real prices, real timelines, the mistakes you see customers make. "What a rewire actually costs in a 1930s Cardiff semi, from an electrician who does them weekly" is citable. "Top 10 electrical safety tips" is not.
3. Keep your entity signals strong
Consistent business details everywhere, a complete Google Business Profile, real reviews, and schema markup on your site all help Google understand who you are and trust you as a source. This overlaps almost entirely with good local SEO, which is convenient, because that is where the clicks still are.
What should you stop wasting money on?
Every pound spent on the old playbook is a pound not spent on what works now. In 2026 we would stop paying for:
- Generic informational blog content. Four "5 tips for..." posts a month is buying traffic Google no longer sends. If content is not built on first-hand expertise or aimed at commercial intent, cut it.
- Traffic as the headline metric. If your agency reports sessions without enquiries, revenue or calls, the report is measuring the wrong thing. Incidentally, this same problem is why so much cheap AI-generated content fails, which we cover in our guide to what AI should and should not do in small business marketing.
- Rank tracking vanity. Position three under an AI Overview is worth a fraction of what it was in 2023. Track clicks and conversions on the queries that make you money.
Move that budget towards local SEO, reviews, conversion improvements and owned channels like email, where no algorithm sits between you and your audience. If you want a structured way to rebalance, this is exactly the kind of shift our retainer clients have been making over the past year, and the pattern is consistent: fewer words published, more enquiries received. Owned channels are also the theme of our look at where social media is heading for local businesses in 2026.
Frequently asked questions
Will my website traffic ever come back to what it was?
Should I block AI crawlers from my website?
Does this mean SEO is dead?
How do I check if AI Overviews have hit my site?
The search landscape has genuinely changed, but for local businesses across Cardiff and South Wales the change is survivable and, played well, an advantage. Your national competitors relied on the informational traffic that just disappeared. Your customers are still searching for someone nearby they can trust. Make sure that is what Google finds.