Open Search Console and look at the last six months. Your average position is roughly where it was, possibly better. Impressions are up. And clicks are down by a third. Nothing broke, nobody penalized you, and no competitor leapfrogged you on the terms that matter. The traffic simply stopped arriving.
This is the question we are asked more than any other at the moment, usually by someone who has spent a fortnight looking for a technical fault that is not there. So it is worth saying plainly: this is not something wrong with your website. The results page stopped being a list of links and started being an answer.
What actually changed
When someone asks a question your business could answer, Google increasingly answers it at the top of the page — synthesized from several sources, with citations underneath. The searcher reads the answer and, very often, that is the end of the session. Your page was used. Your page was not visited.
The effect on click-through is not subtle. On queries where an AI Overview appears, measurements of the top-ranking result put the click-through rate falling from around 7.3% to roughly 1.6%. You did not lose the ranking. You lost the click that used to come with it, which is the part you were actually being paid in.
The behavior has also spread beyond Google entirely. A meaningful share of people now open ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini instead of a search box and ask their question in a full sentence. Gartner’s forecast of a 25% decline in traditional search volume by 2026 looked aggressive when it was published. It reads conservatively now.
Why professional services feel it first
If you are an accountant, a solicitor or a clinic, a large share of your best-performing content has always been explanatory. What is the difference between these two structures. How long does this process take. What happens if I miss this deadline. That content earned traffic for years because it answered a question well.
It is also, unfortunately, exactly the kind of question an AI Overview can answer completely without sending anyone anywhere. Explanatory content is the most exposed category there is. The pages that still earn clicks are the ones where the answer is not the whole transaction — where the reader needs to see who you are, judge whether they trust you, and decide whether to make contact.
The traffic you lost was mostly people who wanted an answer. The traffic you kept is mostly people who want a supplier.
The wrong responses
Two reactions are common and both make things worse. The first is to publish more of the same explanatory content, faster, on the theory that volume will compensate. It will not, and it now carries a real risk of being classed as mass-produced content that exists to rank rather than to help.
The second is to rebuild the site. A rebuild is occasionally the right answer, but almost never for this reason. If your positions are stable, your technical foundation is doing its job, the problem is downstream of anything a redesign would touch.
What still works
The useful shift is to stop optimizing for the click and start optimizing for the citation and the visit that follows it. Those are different jobs, and both are winnable.
- Be quotable. AI systems extract claims. A page that states its central point clearly in one sentence near the top is far more likely to be cited than one that builds to a conclusion over nine paragraphs.
- Be attributable. Named authors with real credentials, dates, and a clear organization behind the page. Anonymous content is cheap to generate and increasingly treated as such.
- Be structured. Clean headings, proper schema, and a page that parses correctly are now doing double duty, they help both the ranking algorithm and the system deciding whether to quote you.
- Be somewhere a citation can land. A cited page that then gives the reader nowhere obvious to go has converted a hard-won mention into nothing.
None of this is a separate discipline, whatever it is being sold as this month. Content that already ranks well is the content that tends to get cited. Generative engine optimization is an additive layer on competent technical SEO and performance work, not a replacement for it, and anyone offering it as a standalone product without looking at your foundations is selling you the roof of a house you have not built.
Measure the right thing now
Sessions is no longer a sufficient headline metric, because a falling number can mean either that you are losing or that you are being summarized. Those require opposite responses. Watch inquiries per thousand impressions rather than clicks. Watch branded search volume, which tends to rise when AI systems are mentioning you. And watch what happens to the small number of pages that still convert, because they now matter disproportionately.
The businesses handling this well are not the ones publishing most. They are the ones who worked out which four or five pages actually earn them money, and made those pages unmissable, quotable and impossible to arrive at without knowing who they are dealing with.
Where to start this week
Pull your top twenty pages by impressions and sort them by the change in click-through rate over the past six months. The ones that fell hardest are your explanatory pages, and they are now working for someone else. Decide honestly whether each one still earns its place, and rewrite the survivors to state their central claim in the first fifty words.
Then look at the pages that did not fall. Those are the ones where being found and being chosen are the same action, the service pages, the case studies, the page where someone decides you are credible. That is where the work is worth doing, and it is a design and positioning problem far more than a keyword one.
