The AI Click Crisis: Why Google’s AI Overviews Are Killing Organic Traffic (and What You Can Do About It)
Google’s AI Overviews feature can be handy for users, but it can be a real problem for business owners seeking web traffic. Charlotte Content Marketing details how you can overcome these challenges and come out on top in the face of AI adversity.
The arrival of Google’s AI Overviews (AIOs) has been the subject of countless debates, but for content marketers and SEO professionals, the conversation has boiled down to one painful reality for business owners in the Charlotte area and elsewhere: While Google claims that AIOs drive more meaningful traffic, the fact is that clicks have gone way down.
Although Google touts AIOs as a service to users (and in many ways, it is,) the aggregated data from leading industry sources paints a clear picture of content devaluation and steep declines in organic traffic (i.e. clicks to your site.)
For Charlotte Content Marketing, this shift is a trend we monitor, but it's also a strategic threat in many industries that demands a new approach to content production and distribution.
Here is a breakdown of the data and a strategy to help your business adapt:
The Hard Data: A Deep Dive into CTR Losses
The evidence against AIOs generating clicks is overwhelming, based on extensive research from SEO titans like Ahrefs. Their studies reveal significant drops in Click-Through Rates (CTR), particularly for high-value informational keywords.
AI is still evolving when it comes to search, but the data is clear: AI Overviews diminish clicks.
Data from Ahrefs (Analysis of 300,000 Keywords):
-34.5% drop in CTR for the #1 organic position when an AI Overview is present.
The study focused heavily on informational intent keywords, which showed a 99.2% overlap with AIO triggers.
The key takeaway from this data is unambiguous: AI Overviews are disproportionately harming non-branded, informational queries. These are the very queries that drive top-of-funnel traffic and brand awareness.
The Branded Keyword Exception
It is worth noting the only exception: only 4.79% of branded keywords trigger AIOs, but those that did saw a minor +18.68% CTR boost. This suggests Google is less likely to synthesize answers for specific brand queries, which are often directly transactional.
Based on our research, experience, and expertise, Charlotte Content Marketing is navigating the challenges and embracing the opportunities that comes along with AI Overviews.
How CCM Has Navigated These Changes
As an aside, while click through has gone down for informational queries, we’ve been ahead of the curve for at least a year now. The truth is that AI does a decent job at answering general questions, but that’s about as far as it goes.
To get ahead, we think beyond the surface-level interactions of AI and “fan out” to related queries. We’ve also heavily recommended our clients take on a personalized approach to content production. Instead of generic content that answers the same questions that have already been answered ad nauseum, we’re pushing for case studies, opinion pieces that draw on cited experiences, and other unique perspectives.
Google’s Claims: Are They Accurate?
Google claims that AI Overviews lead to high-value clicks. This makes some sense as someone who clicks through in an AI Overview is more likely to have high intent versus someone who gleans an answer and moves on.
We won’t go into all of the ins and outs of generative AI and how it works, but essentially, these models train from massive amounts of data available on the web (think Wikipedia, only interactive.)
Because AI can answer basic questions like “How many cups are in a gallon?”, you’re going to lose clicks if that’s the kind of content you’re producing. Plain and simple, top-of-funnel content that used to draw in potential customers is no longer viable. This is why it requires a strong content strategy to gain visibility beyond the answer provided by AI.
In other words, if AI can reproduce the answer, that’s not the kind of content you want to target. Users will simply accept the AI answer and move on.
Content Theft? The Glaring Contradiction in Google’s Policy
Now, whether Google is being straight with us or not regarding clicks and value, we don’t know, but we do know one thing for sure: AIOs are built on scraping and rehashing other people’s hard work.
While Google technically provides a link to the source, the core issue is that AIOs use someone’s copyrighted content to provide an immediate answer without returning the click that finances that content.
This borders a very grey area (and in our opinion crosses a legal line) and feels like content theft at scale. This practice is glaringly contradictory when held up against Google’s own guidance for publishers.
Google’s initial guidance on publishing content expressly forbid scraping…until it became advantageous for the search giant to do so itself.
Google’s Stance for Publishers
Google’s spam and helpful content policies stress that websites must create original, valuable, experience-driven content, not thin summaries or regurgitations. They explicitly discourage content that is “stitched together” or “rephrased.”
What AI Overviews Actually Do
AIOs pull content from multiple sources, repackage that information, and serve it back to the user as a “new” answer (but really, it’s someone else’s answer.) The visible content is a Google-generated digest, not the original publisher’s work. It’s an amalgamation that is essentially a remixed copy.
What’s painful about this for business owners and those of us in the marketing industry is that the very thing Google told webmasters not to do for decades (create thin, regurgitated content) they are now doing themselves. To make matters worse, no one is being compensated at all for this, and websites are losing out on traffic.
While the traditional funnel may have collapsed, this loss has opened many opportunities in its wake.
The True Business Cost: Losing the Funnel
Those clicks used to be the lifeblood of a marketing funnel, maybe even your own. They built brand awareness, shaped perception, and sparked consideration before a purchase.
When a user finds an answer in an AIO, they skip the click, bypassing the opportunity to interact with your site, subscribe to your newsletter, or see your product. Unless we’re talking about branded searches, getting traction through AIOs can be tough unless and until Google changes the way links are displayed.
For now, this loss of visibility directly translates to lost revenue and a weakening of your brand’s authority in the marketplace.
The Visibility Problem: The Data Black Box
While we’d love to show data explaining the details about AIOs, clicks, and more, the critical issue is the lack of clear, isolated reporting in marketing tools like Search Console.
While Google has started to blend some AI-related impressions and clicks into the general data provided by its analytics tools, we still cannot see how many times content is truly triggering an AIO, or how those specific citations perform compared to organic results.
Although we have yet to receive concrete, granular data from Google regarding AI Overviews, we have other methods for tracking visibility.
Without this granular visibility, content audits become exponentially harder, forcing marketing agencies like Charlotte Content Marketing to rely on correlation and external data instead of actionable first-party metrics.
While it’s doable to a degree, it doesn’t allow our team the ability to make a case one way or another for various strategies. Thankfully, we have experience on our side, but it’s still disheartening in the interim.
And if it’s challenging for us, we can only imagine how much more so it is for a business owner who doesn’t have years of experience and insight on their side.
Adaptation is Not Optional: A Compensatory Content Strategy
In addition to writing content that dives below the surface, our content marketing agency is currently recommending making the switch to compensatory strategies to offset the lost clicks and maintain audience engagement.
Maximize Content Quality & Value (The AI-Proof Content)
You need more content that offers sheer, undeniable value that cannot be summarized in a simple AIO. This means shifting focus from simple answers to complex experiences:
Interactive Content: Content that requires user engagement (e.g., proprietary tools and resources).
Original Data/Research: Original case studies, survey data, and proprietary reports that only you can publish.
Deep-Dive Video Content: Creating video content that accompanies your posts for maximum engagement and is harder for AI to summarize.
Branding, authority, and intent still rule the day when it comes to creating content for your business in Charlotte.
Double Down on Brand Authority & Intent
We also recommend creating middle-of-funnel and bottom-of-funnel content to beat AI at its own game by harnessing brand authority and meeting search intent. Based on how generative AI works (and based on the Ahrefs data cited above,) branding is more important than ever.
This means including your brand name, semantics, and connected entities as often as logically possible in your content.
For example, instead of saying, “XYZ Shoe Company makes tennis shoes” in your content, you’d want to say, “Since 1970, XYZ Shoe Company has been the leading manufacturer of tennis shoes and other athletic shoes for active adults in Charlotte, NC.”
What this does is connect “XYZ Shoe Company” to entities like "Charlotte," "active lifestyles," "1970 ( as a start date)," and "industry leadership." This approach achieves two goals:
One of the main benefits of focusing on intent and brand authority is that you can introduce semantic clarity which is then ingested by LLMs and modern search systems like AI Overviews.
Semantic Clarity
It makes it harder for AI to synthesize a generic answer that strips away your brand context, as the answer is now tied to specific facts that are unique to your brand.
Generative Visibility
It ensures that this rich, contextual data is ingested by Large Language Models (LLMs) and indexed in the Google Knowledge Graph. This increases the likelihood that your brand will be explicitly named and cited in a complex, multi-entity AI search result, which is the primary goal of entity-based SEO.
Search is no longer a singular function with one source. Diversifying and expanding distribution is now more important than ever.
Diversify & Distribute Beyond Search
Aggressively audit and cull anything that is "dead" or contributes little value. The resources saved can be redirected toward high-quality, compensatory content. Our goal here is to maximize reach across multiple channels. Our advice? Don't let your content die in search results. Organic search still takes up the lion’s share of all search, but with AI on the scene, it can’t be the ONLY form of content distribution you take on.
Get new content out over social media platforms.
Create short-form and long-form video content for your business that link back to your high-value content. (Thankfully, Google is prominently featuring videos in many search results, so having current and frequent video updates is very helpful.)
Invest in podcasting as Google creates transcripts in YouTube that can then feed into AI and other search products.
Engage in brand building and link building to create a larger digital footprint to support brand mentions in relevant places.
Charlotte Content Marketing continues to lead the way in diversified content strategies designed to help business owners build, foster, and further customer relationships.
How Charlotte Content Marketing is Leading the Pivot
As mentioned above, Charlotte Content Marketing views the AIO challenge as just that: a challenge. These are not new in the world of content marketing and SEO, and they’re certainly not unique in the world of business.
But as a strategic pivot point. Our approach is designed to insulate clients from the worst of the CTR drops while aggressively pursuing new visibility channels.
Auditing for AIO-Vulnerability
We are conducting deep-dive audits to identify existing content that is highly likely to be absorbed by AI Overviews (i.e., short, simple informational content). We then prioritize rewriting or enhancing this content to include proprietary insights, original data, or interactive elements, making it too valuable to skip.
We’re also recommended the culling of “dead” content that’s simply taking up space without contributing to enhanced visibility.
Although there are many more ways to diversify your content strategy, we recommend a minimum of five production and distribution methods to truly see results.
The 5-Channel Distribution Rule
Every piece of high-value content we create is now engineered for a minimum of five distribution points: website, email, podcasting, social media feeds, and short-form video platforms.
We're maximizing visibility across the web, ensuring brand awareness doesn't rely on a single (increasingly hostile) Google entry point.
Focus on the Transactional Edge
We are placing renewed emphasis on optimizing for keywords with high commercial intent and branded queries, where data shows less AIO disruption and even potential CTR boosts. In a nutshell, our strategies are shifting content closer to the purchase decision.
As with all changes in content marketing, the key to success is to adapt to changing trends and technologies. As we continue to stay on top of these changes, we’ll provide updates so you can enjoy the journey alongside our team.
Got Questions About Your Content Strategy in the Era of AI? Contact Charlotte Content Marketing!
Contact Charlotte Content Marketing online using our contact form, or reach us by phone at 704-323-6762. We’ll be happy to provide answers, guidance, and solutions to help your Charlotte-area business build, foster, and further customer relationships (with humans, not AI.)
