Here is the pattern. Your rankings have not moved. Your impressions in Search Console are stable or slightly up. Your clicks are down twenty or thirty per cent, and your click-through rate has fallen off a cliff.
Nothing is broken. The question is being answered before anyone reaches your site.
Confirm it before you act
Three checks:
1. Compare impressions to clicks over twelve months. If impressions held and clicks fell, the change is in what happens on the results page, not in your rankings.
2. Split it by query type. Informational queries lose the most. "What is X" and "how do I Y" get answered in the overview. "X near me" and "buy X" are much less affected, because the searcher needs to go somewhere.
3. Look at the actual results page. Search your main terms and see whether an AI Overview appears, and whether you are cited in it. Being cited still brings some clicks. Not being cited when your competitor is brings almost none.
What actually changed
Google now answers a large share of informational searches directly, citing a handful of sources. For those searches, the traffic that used to flow to positions one through five is now split between the overview and whoever gets cited inside it.
This affects publishers and informational content hardest. Commercial and local searches are far more resilient, because a person who wants a dentist still has to click through to book one.
What to do about it
Be the source that gets cited
If an overview is going to appear whatever you do, being one of its cited sources is worth more than position three underneath it.
The pages that get cited answer the question directly, early and specifically. A 40 to 60 word direct answer at the top of the page, then the detail. Question-shaped headings with the answer immediately underneath. Concrete numbers rather than hedged generalities.
This is the same work as getting cited by ChatGPT, because it is the same mechanism.
Move your content mix
If your traffic depended on top-of-funnel informational content, that model is under pressure and it is not coming back.
Shift effort toward:
- Comparison and decision content. "X versus Y for Z" still gets clicked, because people want to see the reasoning, not a summary.
- Original data. An overview can summarise a fact. It cannot replace being the only source of a number.
- Commercial pages. Terms where the searcher has to arrive somewhere to complete the task.
- Content that requires trust. Anything where people want to see who is saying it.
Stop measuring success in sessions
If your monthly report leads with organic sessions, it is now measuring something partly outside your control.
Lead with conversions, revenue or calls. Then rankings. Then impressions, which tell you about visibility. Sessions somewhere after that.
We changed our own reporting for this reason. A month where sessions fell and leads rose is a good month, and a report that hides that is not a report.
Track your AI visibility deliberately
Add a monthly check of whether you appear in the overview for your main terms, and whether assistants name you for your category. Keep the prompt set fixed so month-to-month comparison means something.
What does not help
Blocking Google-Extended does not remove you from AI Overviews. It is a separate control covering Gemini and model training, and blocking it mainly removes you from places you might have been cited.
Rewriting everything into an FAQ format does not help either, unless the answers are genuinely better than what is there now. Format is not the lever. Being the clearest, most specific answer is.
This is the core of what we do under AI search optimization. The AI search optimization guide covers the full approach, and the free AI visibility checker gives you a reading on where you stand today.