For about fifteen years the deal with Google was simple. Rank first for the thing your buyer types, and you get the click. Businesses built entire marketing plans on that trade.
The trade has changed. Ahrefs reran its click study this year across 300,000 keywords and found that when an AI Overview shows up, the top ranking page gets 58% fewer clicks than it would have otherwise. Eight months earlier the same study put that number at 34.5%.
The top spot still exists. It just pays a lot less on a growing share of searches. Here's which searches, what that does to your pipeline, and what we'd do about it.
What the numbers say
Three independent sources, measured three different ways, land in the same place.
- Ahrefs compared Search Console click rates from December 2023 to December 2025. On searches with an AI Overview, position one lost 58% of its clicks.
- Pew Research Center tracked the real browsing of 900 U.S. adults. People clicked a regular result on 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared, versus 15% when it didn't. Only 1% of visits included a click on a source cited inside the summary.
- Seer Interactive found that on searches with an AI Overview, pages cited in it got a click rate of roughly 2.1%, while pages left out got about 0.9%. Searches with no AI Overview sat near 3.3%. Search Engine Land has the breakdown.
That last one deserves a second look. Being cited doesn't get you back to the old numbers. It does get you more than double what you earn when the summary answers the question and leaves you out.
Not every search got eaten
This is the part the panic skips. The same Seer data shows AI Overviews appearing on about 95% of comparison searches and 86% of question searches, but only around 5% of transactional ones.
In plain terms: "what is a DMR radio" and "analog vs digital two way radio" now get answered on the results page. "Two way radio dealer Dallas" still sends people to websites, because nobody can hire a paragraph.
That split tells you what broke. The old content playbook was to publish a pile of general explainers, collect the traffic, and hope some of it turned into leads. Those explainers are exactly the searches that no longer produce a visit. Your service pages, your location pages, and anything a buyer reads right before they call are mostly intact.
Traffic was always a stand in
Nobody ever wanted traffic for its own sake. You wanted to be the company a buyer already trusts by the time they pick up the phone. Traffic was the easiest thing to count along the way.
Picture a buyer who asks an AI tool which radio dealers can cover a school district in North Texas and sees your name in the answer. That buyer has been marketed to. No visit was recorded and your analytics show nothing. Three weeks later they type your company name straight into the browser and fill out your form, and the report credits "direct."
So the scoreboard has to change before the strategy can. The numbers worth watching now:
- Branded search volume. Are more people searching your name this quarter than last?
- Direct traffic to your contact and service pages.
- The "how did you hear about us" field. Add one if you don't have it, and make it a free text box.
- Lead quality. Fewer visits with the same number of good calls isn't a decline.
What gets a business named in the answer
Nobody outside these companies can tell you exactly how a model picks its sources, and anyone selling a guaranteed formula is guessing. What follows is what holds up across the published research and what we build for clients.
Answer first, then explain
Put the direct answer in the first two sentences under each heading. Pew measured the typical AI summary at 67 words. A system building a 67 word answer is looking for a clean sentence it can lift, and it won't dig through four paragraphs of warm up to find one.
Publish what only you know
A model can write a generic explainer without you. It can't invent your lead times, your price ranges, what goes wrong on install day, or how long licensing takes. That information has to come from someone who does the work.
A radio dealer who publishes what a repeater site really costs, with the reasons the number moves, has something worth citing. A dealer with a page titled "Why Clear Communication Matters" has what every other dealer has.
Show up in places you don't own
Pew found that Wikipedia, Reddit, and YouTube were the sources cited most often in the summaries it studied. That doesn't mean a regional business should go start a subreddit. It means these systems learn about you from third parties: your Google Business Profile, your reviews, trade association listings, manufacturer dealer locators, local news, a supplier's case study. If your name, services, and service area read differently in each of those places, you're harder to describe with confidence.
Make the page easy to parse
Write headings the way a buyer would ask the question. Keep one topic per page. Add schema markup for your business, your services, and your FAQs. None of this is new. It's ordinary good SEO, and it matters more now because the first reader is a machine that summarizes.
What to stop doing
Stop publishing explainers nobody at your company would bother to read. If the post could run on a competitor's site with the logo swapped, it's competing in the exact category of search that stopped paying.
Stop reporting rank as the headline number. Position one on a search that sends 58% fewer clicks isn't the win it was in 2023, and a report that hides that isn't helping you decide anything.
Stop treating the blog as separate from the rest of the system. A cited answer that leads to a slow, confusing website still loses the deal.
A thirty minute test
Write down the five questions buyers ask before they call you. Skip the keywords. Use full questions, the way a person would say them out loud.
Ask each one in ChatGPT, in Google's AI Mode, and in Perplexity. Write down which companies get named and which pages get cited.
If you're in the answers, find out which page earned it and make more like it. If you aren't, look closely at who is. Whatever they published that you haven't is your content plan for next quarter.
If you want a second set of eyes on the results, this is the work behind our AI Powered Content and SEO service. Book a call and bring your five questions.
