Search driven traffic used to deliver visitors and sales. AI is reducing those clicks and businesses that rely on educational content are feeling it first.
For years, the formula for online business success was simple: Climb the search rankings in Google and/or shell out for ads on the dominant search site to drive traffic. But Google’s AI Overviews, rolled out in May 2024, are dramatically cutting clicks to websites by delivering answers, instead of links, at the top of the search page.
Knowledge-driven businesses—consultancies, publishers, and e-learning platforms—have felt it first. Local outfits—think diners, plumbers, or carpenters—have mostly yet to feel the pain, as their customers arrive through location-based searches. But time is running short for them too, warn search engine optimization (SEO) consultants who work with small businesses.
Internet veteran Andrew Shotland, who founded Local SEO Guide way back in 2006, says he’s already seeing the hit on small businesses that have relied on educational content to bring prospective customers to their websites. He points to a law firm client that has traditionally gotten heavy traffic from queries like “Is car sex legal in Alabama?” Google that question today, and you’re likely to get an AI Overview that discusses public lewdness under Alabama Code Title 13A and Class C misdemeanors, with attribution, perhaps, to FindLaw and Justia Law. While that sort of overview doesn’t produce much traffic for FindLaw and Justia, it has reduced the clicks Shotland’s client is getting, even though it still turns up in the search results.
Those missing clicks matter. Without them, businesses lose a direct connection with potential customers. No website visit means no opportunity to tell their story, build credibility, or make a pitch. Yet that decline can be easy to miss. That’s because companies track impressions or web ranking. Perversely, both might look fine, or even improve. In fact, Google AI Overviews can boost impressions (how often a site appears in search results).This happens when the AI generates a summary or snippet that includes the site’s link, making it visible to users. Even if the AI pulls information from the site without users visiting it, the site’s appearance in the AI Overview counts as an impression. However, clicks–the actual visits to a business’ site–decline because users often find enough information in the AI summary and don’t need to click through. The site still ranks, but users aren’t clicking, which is what counts.
Seer Interactive reports a 70% drop in organic clickthrough rates when AI Overviews appear. Pew Research Center found that users click traditional links at just half the rate when a search produces an AI summary, as when it doesn’t, and that just 1% of those who see an AI summary actually click on a link embedded within that summary. “Zero click search redefines marketing,’’ is the way consultant Bain & Company puts it. According to Bain, 80% of consumers are relying on “zero-click” results at least 40% of the time.
It’s hard to overstate the importance of online searches for merchants. In 2022, research firm Forrester estimated that 59% of all retail transactions had a digital component, meaning the sale either happened online or the customer researched the product or company online first before buying at a physical location. That translated into $2.7 trillion in revenue. Forrester projects that figure will grow to $3.8 trillion by 2027.
So far, the biggest hit from Google’s AI Overview has been to news and information sites. Ben Fisher, who runs the SEO firm Steady Demand, echoes Shotland’s assessment that most small businesses haven’t seen much impact yet. Both say their clients—plumbers, local restaurants and even lawyers—are still showing up in search and still getting leads, even if some sites (like those of lawyers who rely heavily on educational content) may already be getting fewer clicks.
But they’re also both urging clients to start taking steps now. And they’re offering some surprising advice: Even though AI summaries don’t directly lead to clicks, they say, it’s important that companies show up in them, meaning that they need to up their sites’ educational content.
Shotland explains the seeming contradiction this way: Research shows people increasingly trust AI summaries, and that can change how they eventually select businesses. So showing up in a summary presumably has a halo effect. Those companies that do show up in these summaries may get fewer clicks than before AI, when they simply appeared high in search results. But they also may be getting higher quality leads, since those who click after reading a summary may be more serious about a subject, or closer to the point of buying, particularly from a source that has been validated by the AI summary. The problem is that the quality of a lead is hard to measure. Clicks, on the other hand, are easy to count. As Shotland concedes, trying to sell clients on the idea that fewer clicks might be better clicks is a hard pitch to make.
So what should businesses do now? Fisher recommends that they take ownership of how they appear in AI-generated summaries. This starts with reputation management. Make sure your listings are accurate, and correct bad or misleading summaries. In other words, ask about your business and ask questions related to the content of your business and see what AI produces.
Fisher gives an example of his own company, which was misrepresented in a Google AI Overview due to a Reddit post about a different business in which his company was mentioned. He submitted feedback and had the summary corrected (you can do so by clicking the “thumbs down” button on an overview then clicking “Report a problem” in the pop-up). This kind of diligence, he says, is more important than ever. “The content that’s on your website and the content and the narrative, which is out there on the internet, is what’s really important to massage the AI Overview,” he says.
Shotland says that businesses should also avoid blocking AI crawlers, which could prevent them from showing up in overviews at all. And he recommends exploring list-style content and other formats like videos that seem to perform well in AI summaries.
Bottom line: Most small businesses face no immediate crisis from Google’s AI Overviews, but as these summaries grab more user attention, it could weaken companies’ control over their marketing and consumer connections, particularly if they don’t adapt. Fine-tuning content for AI summaries, fixing inaccuracies, and developing traffic sources beyond search (for example, creating content for YouTube or TikTok) could keep them competitive. Acting now gives them a leg up in the changing AI-driven search world.
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