Since their introduction two years ago by Google, AI Overviews have ruined traffic for most websites. Even the big elephants have seen a decrease in visitors. Personally, I hate AI Overviews, as they bring nothing concrete to the world of browsing. I agree that if your site is featured, you may be happy, but how do you know if your link is being clicked for visitors to end up on your website? Sometimes, AI bots are not tracked by analytics.
How AI Overviews Are Bad?
I am going to list how AI Overviews are affecting your traffic, and you will realize the immense damage they are causing.
- Zero-Click: AI is summarizing everything at the top. Most of the time, people are satisfied with the generated answer and do not bother to click on the referenced links. Hence, you get nothing from the query.
- No Visitors, No Money!: Since users are getting their answers at the top, they will not bother to click your link to read more. If your website is monetized through, for example, banners, pop-up ads, etc., these ads will neither be seen nor clicked. No visitors means no earnings, leading to a decrease in revenue.
- Affect Engagement-Based Tracking: If you have custom tracking analytics, such as Meta Pixels, there is a chance they will be starved for data due to a lack of engagement on your website. The issue is that these trackers are sometimes activated after a certain amount of time, such as with a 15-second read timer, but if your visitors are not coming to your website in the first place, these trackers will not gather enough data to populate.
- Informational Queries Are Dead: Question-based websites, how-to guides, and other similar platforms are being fully absorbed by AI Overviews now. You search for "How to make fried noodles", and the AI Overview answers you straightaway. Reddit, Quora, and similar websites will no doubt be dead in the coming years. This renders basic informational posts nearly useless.
- Conversion Funnels Are Dead: As people are bypassing your website, your conversion funnels like upsells, calls to action, service upgrades, submission forms, etc, will not be used.
- Hidden Sources: AI Overviews do credit the websites they crawl by listing them as references at the bottom. But most of the time, people do not care, as the sources are often small and basically hidden if their names or links are long.
The 3 SEO Fixes You Can Implement to Counter AI Overviews
(1) Passive crawling is dead! You will lose traffic to AI models that update their knowledge bases instantly. Because search engines take a hell of a time to index your content, your competitors have already fed AI agents to generate an answer to a query. You must stop waiting for crawlers and force your way into discovery. The solution is to submit your website link to indexers that use IndexNow technology. Do it for free here:
(2) Another solution is to change the way you measure traffic. Stop tracking your visitors via page views. It is outdated. Track visitors via engagement instead. For example, implement a custom event to track readers' time such as a 20-second timer or track if they have scrolled through 70% of your web page. AI largely absorbs top-funnel informational queries, meaning your raw traffic volume will no doubt drop. Before, we used to count traffic views; now, we need engagement views! As a result, the more engagement you get, the better you can optimize your content to rank at the top and trigger AI agents to favor your links.
(3) Add more features to your content. AI Overviews only summarize textual content, but they do not include calculators, polls, and other interactive elements. Make your content superior by adding more tools instead of just text and images. This will compel visitors to click your link to access raw information, real data, and other dynamic resources.
Conclusion
AI Overviews have killed thousands of blogs. Large blogs are surviving, but they have also been affected. New blogs, however, are struggling, which will force bloggers to quit. If your blog receives only 100 visitors a month, it is already a dead blog. Implement these three basic SEO fixes to deal with AI Overviews, and things can change.
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September 22, 2026