The one-line version
Google now answers around half of all searches directly on the results page, clicks to websites have fallen sharply where it does, and the businesses still winning traffic are the ones Google quotes as its source.
What happened
Google’s AI Overviews, the generated answers that sit above the normal results, now appear on roughly 48% of searches, up from about a third a year ago. Where an Overview appears, independent studies agree on the direction and roughly on the size of the damage: Ahrefs measured a 58% fall in clicks to the top result across 300,000 keywords, and Seer Interactive’s tracking found much the same. Business-to-business and healthcare queries are among the most affected. There is a counterweight in the same research: businesses that are cited inside the Overview earn measurably more clicks than those that are not.
What it means for you
Traffic from broad informational searches is falling and will not be coming back, so measuring your website on raw visits is now actively misleading. What still clicks through is searches with intent: people looking for a supplier, a price, a phone number, a specific answer a snippet cannot satisfy. And the new competition is not for position one but for being the source the machine quotes, which rewards pages that answer a question directly, name their evidence and mark themselves up properly.
What we are doing about it
For our SEO clients we now report cited appearances in AI answers alongside rankings. We are rewriting key pages so the direct answer comes first and the detail follows. And we are telling everyone the same thing we always have: the site’s job is enquiries, not visits, and the businesses that measure enquiries are noticing this shift far less than the headlines suggest.