If your rankings look fine but clicks are falling, it's likely Google's AI Overviews answering the question before anyone reaches your site — not something broken on your end. The fix isn't chasing old rankings harder. It's creating content only you could have written, so the AI has a reason to send people to you.
- When Google shows an AI Overview, people click through far less often — even at position one.
- This hits generic "how-to" and definition content hardest. Original data, opinions, and specifics hold up much better.
- You can't opt out of AI Overviews yet. You can control whether your content is easy for an AI to just summarize and skip.
First, the reassuring part
If you've checked Search Console and your rankings look the same as always, but clicks keep sliding — you're not losing. Google is just answering more questions directly on the results page, before anyone reaches your site at all.
This isn't a small dip. Ahrefs found AI Overviews cut clicks by roughly a third across 300,000 keywords they tracked. When Google's AI shows an answer, most people simply never click through — not even to the page ranked first.
Why some pages get hit harder than others
Not every page loses equally. The ones taking the worst hit are the ones an AI can summarize in two lines: "what is X," basic how-tos, generic definitions. If a machine can compress your page into a sentence without losing anything, it will — and it won't send anyone your way afterward.
What holds up: content with something in it a summary can't replace. Your own numbers. A real opinion, not a neutral one. Something you tested yourself, not something restated from ten other articles.
What's actually worth doing
You can't switch AI Overviews off. But you can stop writing content that's easy to swallow whole. A few honest shifts: lead with a real answer instead of three paragraphs of throat-clearing, put your own numbers or experience in every piece, and stop chasing "what is X" queries that a machine will always answer faster than you can.
Worth doing too: check which of your existing pages are losing clicks despite steady rankings — those are your casualties, and they're the ones worth rewriting first rather than starting from scratch. And don't only measure clicks. If your brand starts getting named inside AI answers, that's a real outcome too, even on the searches where nobody clicks through at all.
The businesses holding steady right now aren't fighting the algorithm. They're just writing things worth clicking through for.
Related service: SEO & Content