What to do when AI Overviews take your clicks

If AI Overviews are taking your clicks, first confirm in Search Console that your positions and impressions are stable. Then rewrite the pages where Google now answers the question itself and make them citable as a source. From now on, measure leads from organic and AI traffic, not clicks.

You open Search Console and there it is: impressions carry on as normal, but clicks have been sliding for months. Your marketer says “AI Overviews”, your CFO asks whether content still makes sense. This is the playbook we follow with B2B software companies, and the starting point of our work on GEO.

Are your falling clicks really caused by AI Overviews?

A quarter of an hour in Search Console tells you. According to Google, impressions and clicks from AI features are counted in the Performance report, under the Web search type. So you cannot filter them separately. You recognise them by the pattern.

If it is mainly step 2 that moves, AI is not the main suspect. Rule out a core update, a migration or a tracking error first with the diagnosis in GA4 and Search Console. Want to record a baseline to keep following the trend? Use the step-by-step plan to measure AI Overviews traffic.

Which pages do you tackle first?

Not the page with the biggest loss, but the page with the biggest loss on a question your buyer asks. A definition of “what is an SLA” rarely produces a demo. A page on “choosing helpdesk software for an SME” does.

Hold your list up against these three questions:

1. Does the page answer the question the AI now answers at the top? Then rewrite the answer block under the H1: 60 words at most, answering the question literally.
2. What is the AI answer missing? Usually the Benelux context, prices, integrations, regulation or a trade-off per situation. That is what you add, because that is the reason to click anyway.
3. Do you have your own figures? A benchmark from your product, time saved at customers or a table with your own measurement data. An AI cannot find that anywhere else, so it has to refer to you.

Pages that only give a general definition without buying intent, let them go. Those clicks will not come back, and they brought little pipeline. Read more about that trade-off in our piece on zero-click searches.

How do you write a page that gets cited in AI Overviews and still earns clicks?

Google itself says no additional requirements or special optimisations are needed to appear in AI Overviews. What does work is a page that is easy to cite and gives a reason to keep reading.

• Answer first. Put the answer in the first paragraph and the nuance below it. How to do that is explained in answer-first writing for AI.
• Dated tables. A table saying “measured in September 2026” is a concrete, verifiable fragment for an AI. Read why tables often end up in AI answers.
• Cover the sub-questions. AI Overviews search for related sub-questions through “query fan-out”. A page that also answers the follow-up question gets included more often.
• A clear entity. Describe your product and category with the same words everywhere: on your site, LinkedIn, G2 and in press releases. See entity consistency.
• Keep something behind the click. The answer sits at the top, but the calculator, the comparison or the worked example lives on your page.

The full approach is in getting found in Google AI Overviews and the broader guide to GEO.

How do you measure value when you get impressions but no clicks?

An impression without a click is not worthless, but you have to measure it differently. Work with three layers:

New pages show something striking here. In our own Search Console data, they draw a larger share of their impressions from long questions of seven words or more than older pages do. At Hedgehog Company that was 19% against 10%, at Kaizo 16% against 10%. Those are exactly the questions on which AI Overviews appear. And they get cited quickly: on their own question, Hedgehog was listed as a source in 23 of the 31 AI Overviews, for articles less than two months old. On the broader head term, it was only 1 in 18 times.

Does content still make sense if Google answers the question itself?

Yes, but the maths changes. You no longer count clicks, you count leads and deals. According to Google, clicks from results pages with an AI Overview are of higher quality: people stay on the site longer. Whoever clicks after the AI answer wants to go further than a definition.

We see that in conversion too. At Kaizo, organic traffic in September 2025 converted 38 times better to key events than paid traffic (4.6% against 0.12%). Key events are intent signals, such as viewing a pricing page, and not yet demos.

Not sure whether an article is still worth it? Set its price next to a paid click. A click on “helpdesk software” costs about USD 146 in Google Ads in the Netherlands. Work it out for your own category with the click-or-article calculator.

When we are not the right choice

If your positions are dropping too, you first need technical or content SEO work, not a GEO programme. If you live off advertising revenue per pageview, like a publisher, a publisher SEO specialist is a better fit. And if you are looking for a guaranteed mention in AI Overviews: nobody can honestly promise that, and neither do we.

Frequently asked questions