Google AI Overviews are eating your organic traffic. Now what?

A specialized office equipment e-commerce in Liege showed us their numbers last week. In three months, organic traffic on their 20 most visited pages dropped by 34%. No Google penalty, no classic algorithm change. Just AI Overviews rolling out on their main queries.

They're not alone. On SEO forums, the testimonies keep multiplying: "Google's AI Overviews are eating my traffic" has become a daily refrain.

What's actually happening?

Since the massive rollout of AI Overviews in Europe in late 2025, Google displays an AI-generated summary at the top of the results page for a growing share of informational queries. The user gets their answer without clicking on any link.

The data is clear. According to an Ahrefs analysis of 300,000 queries, organic clicks drop by 30 to 60% when an AI Overview appears. For queries like "what is," "how to" and "best X for Y," the drop often exceeds 50%.

And it's not going to stop. Google is already testing AI Overviews on commercial and transactional queries. Your "best accounting software for SMEs" page that generated 2,000 visits per month? It could lose half by summer.

Not all sectors are affected equally

We analyzed the impact across our B2B clients in Belgium and France. Results vary significantly by content type.

Pure informational pages are hit the hardest. Glossaries, definitions, "101" guides — anything that provides a short factual answer suffers enormously. A client in the logistics sector lost 58% of traffic on their "What is cross-docking?" page. Makes sense: Google answers in three lines.

Deep expertise pages hold up better. Long articles with original data, case studies, and strong opinions lose less traffic. Why? Because the AI Overview can't summarize them in a paragraph. The user has to click for the depth.

Transactional intent pages are still relatively spared. But that's changing. When someone searches "SEO audit price Belgium," Google doesn't yet systematically show an AI Overview. When it does — and it will — even those pages will be impacted.

The "non-summarizable" content strategy

We can't prevent Google from showing AI Overviews. But we can create content that the AI Overview can't replace.

An AI Overview summarizes. It gives the essentials in 4-5 sentences. It can't reproduce a nuanced 2,000-word analysis, a detailed case study with before/after numbers, or a comparison with strong opinions.

This means an editorial shift for many companies. No more "5 tips to improve your SEO" articles. Time for deep analyses, original data, and strong stances. Surface-level content is dead — not because it's bad, but because AI replaces it for free.

Getting cited IN the AI Overview

Rather than fighting AI Overviews, another approach is to get cited in them. Google sometimes mentions sources in its summaries, with a link. Being one of those sources is like being in position zero — except the click-through rate is different.

How to maximize your chances? Preliminary data suggests that Google primarily cites sources that offer verifiable factual information, correct schema.org markup, and recognized authority in their field. In other words: the same criteria as for AI visibility in general.

One of our clients — a cybersecurity firm in Brussels — managed to get cited in the AI Overview for "best cybersecurity audit SME Belgium." Their secret? A page with precise numbers, flawless FAQPage markup, and four mentions in specialized press. Traffic from the AI Overview now accounts for 12% of their organic visits on that page.

Diversify your channels. Now.

The bottom line is simple: if 80% of your acquisition depends on Google organic traffic, you have a structural problem. AI Overviews are just a symptom of a broader shift. Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini — all these tools increasingly answer your prospects' questions directly.

The companies that are doing well are those that diversify. Newsletter, LinkedIn, events, partnerships, YouTube content (which LLMs also index). Not to abandon SEO — but to stop depending on it exclusively.

And above all, invest in AI visibility as a discipline of its own. Being cited by ChatGPT when a prospect asks for a recommendation in your sector is worth as much — if not more — than a #1 position on Google.

Organic traffic as we knew it is mutating. The companies that accept this today will be the ones thriving tomorrow. The rest will watch their curves decline wondering what happened.