SEO / 9 September 2026 / 3 min read
AI Overviews cut clicks by 40%. What a small business website does now
A randomised experiment has finally isolated what Google's AI answers do to organic traffic. The response is not to write more articles.
For two years the argument about Google's AI Overviews ran on before-and-after traffic charts, which are easy to dispute. In 2026 two researchers ran the experiment properly. Saharsh Agarwal of the Indian School of Business and Ananya Sen of Carnegie Mellon recruited 1,065 desktop Chrome users, installed a browser extension, and randomly hid AI Overviews for some of them between January and February 2026.
The result: when an AI Overview appeared, organic clicks fell by 39.8% and searches that ended without any click rose by 34.5%. Clicks on sponsored results did not move. Users reported no improvement in satisfaction or information quality. The summary took the click; it did not make the search better.
The correlational studies point the same way. Ahrefs compared 300,000 keywords between December 2023 and December 2025 and found the click-through rate of the top organic result fell from 7.3% to 1.6% on queries with an Overview. The Reuters Institute and Chartbeat measured a 33% fall in Google traffic to publishers in the year to November 2025.
Why this is not only a publisher problem
Most of the coverage is about news sites, because they are the loudest. But the mechanism applies to any page that answers a question: "how much does a security guard cost", "what is a medical courier", "do I need a permit for this". Those informational queries are what small business blogs were built to catch. When the answer is in the Overview, the visit that used to follow does not happen.
The queries that survive are the ones an AI summary cannot complete: booking, quoting, calling, checking availability, comparing a specific provider. Those are also the queries that were always worth the most.
What I changed in my own client work
The Spade Security Services site has 27 long-form articles and a local SEO structure aimed at Placer County cities. That work still matters, but the emphasis has shifted, and the changes below are the ones I now make on any site I maintain.
- Make the site the source the summary cites. Overviews link to sources. Clear headings, direct answers in the first paragraph, and structured data (Organization, Service, FAQ, LocalBusiness) increase the chance the citation is you. That click is smaller than it was, but it is the one left.
- Move the value below the answer. If the article's entire worth is the fact in paragraph one, the Overview has it. If the page also offers a calculator, a checklist, a downloadable template, or a quote form, there is a reason to arrive.
- Own the local and transactional queries. "Security company in Rocklin" produces a map pack and business profiles, not an Overview. Local pages, reviews, and an accurate business profile matter more than another explainer.
- Measure impressions and citations, not only clicks. A page that appears inside an Overview without a click still shaped a decision. Search Console impressions and branded-search volume show that; sessions alone now understate it.
- Build channels the summary cannot intercept. Email lists, direct enquiries, and the chatbot on the site itself. Argus, the assistant on the Spade site, answers the visitor who did arrive, which is the traffic that counts.
The uncomfortable part
None of this restores the 2023 click-through rate. The experiment's most important finding is that the loss is causal and that Google's paid clicks were unaffected. A business that relied on free informational traffic is now competing for a smaller pool and paying for the rest. The response is to stop measuring the website by visits and start measuring it by what visitors do when they arrive.
Sources
- The Impact of Google AI Overviews on Publisher Traffic and User Experience: Evidence from a Field Experiment, Agarwal and Sen, SSRN, posted 3 April 2026
- Researchers find Google AI Overviews cut publisher clicks 39.8%, PPC Land, 2026
- Google AI Overviews Impact On Publishers & How To Adapt Into 2026, Search Engine Journal
- Google AI Overviews Impact on Publishers Explained, Magazine Coalition