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 Googleâs 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 businessesâconsultancies, publishers, and e-learning platformsâhave felt it first. Local outfitsâthink diners, plumbers, or carpentersâhave 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 heâs 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 âIs car sex legal in Alabama?â Google that question today, and youâre 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 doesnât produce much traffic for FindLaw and Justia, it has reduced the clicks Shotlandâs 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. Thatâs 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 siteâs link, making it visible to users. Even if the AI pulls information from the site without users visiting it, the siteâs appearance in the AI Overview counts as an impression. However, clicksâthe actual visits to a businessâ siteâdecline because users often find enough information in the AI summary and donât need to click through. The site still ranks, but users arenât 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 doesnât, and that just 1% of those who see an AI summary actually click on a link embedded within that summary. âZero click search redefines marketing,ââ is the way consultant Bain & Company puts it. According to Bain, 80% of consumers are relying on âzero-clickâ results at least 40% of the time.
Itâs 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 Googleâs AI Overview has been to news and information sites. Ben Fisher, who runs the SEO firm Steady Demand, echoes Shotlandâs assessment that most small businesses havenât seen much impact yet. Both say their clientsâplumbers, local restaurants and even lawyersâare 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 theyâre also both urging clients to start taking steps now. And theyâre offering some surprising advice: Even though AI summaries donât directly lead to clicks, they say, itâs important that companies show up in them, meaning that they need to up their sitesâ 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 âthumbs downâ button on an overview then clicking âReport a problemâ in the pop-up). This kind of diligence, he says, is more important than ever. âThe content thatâs on your website and the content and the narrative, which is out there on the internet, is whatâs really important to massage the AI Overview,â 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 Googleâs AI Overviews, but as these summaries grab more user attention, it could weaken companiesâ control over their marketing and consumer connections, particularly if they donât 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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