More and more business owners see the same picture in their statistics: positions in Google are holding up reasonably well, but fewer visitors come from them. The explanation sits above the search results. Where there used to be ten blue links, there's now often an answer first.

The question isn't whether that's bad. The question is what you do about it.

01 / the figuresWhat actually disappears

The two figures cited in the box speak for themselves. In the Netherlands, AI Overviews, Google's answer block, appeared for 16 per cent of the search terms studied (Ahrefs, November 2025). And where such an answer appears, the first result had a 58 per cent lower click-through rate than expected in December 2025 (Ahrefs); a field experiment with real users found roughly 38 per cent fewer clicks to websites (Agarwal and Sen, 2026). What AI Overviews are exactly and when they appear is covered in what are Google AI Overviews.

That loss is real, and there is no indication that the old click volume will return. Anyone who gets an answer to their question no longer has a reason to click through. Any strategy that relies on the old click volume coming back is being overly optimistic.

You recognise the pattern in your own figures as a widening gap: impressions in Search Console that stay level or rise, while clicks lag behind. The pages are still being found and shown; they're just clicked on less, because the answer above has already been given.

02 / the nuanceWhich visitor you lose

Mainly the one who wasn't bringing you anything anyway.

The visitor who disappears is the one who was looking for a single fact: opening hours, a definition, a price indication. That person arrived, read one paragraph and left. In your statistics they counted as a visitor; in your revenue they rarely counted at all.

Anyone who still clicks through after an AI answer does so because the answer wasn't enough: they want to compare, verify or make contact. That's a smaller number of visitors with a higher chance of something coming from it. Less traffic therefore doesn't automatically mean fewer customers here, although the ratio differs by sector and can't be predicted in advance.

Traffic was always an intermediate step. The answer is the new final destination, and the question is whether you appear in it.

03 / the shiftFrom traffic to presence

If the answer is the final destination, then the new question is who appears in that answer.

A business that appears as a source or recommendation in the answer reaches the searcher without a click. That mention doesn't show up in your visitor statistics, and yet it does the work a page used to do: planting the name with someone who is making a choice. A business that doesn't appear has become invisible for exactly the search queries it used to get traffic from.

That makes the decline in your statistics ambiguous. It can mean you're out of the picture, and it can mean you're visible in a place your measurement doesn't see. Without separate measurement, that difference can't be established.

There is one signal you already get for free: customers who mention on the phone or in a first conversation how they found you. Anyone who hears more often that ChatGPT or another assistant mentioned the name knows the mentions are working, even though no dashboard shows a graph of it. It pays to ask that question as standard with every new enquiry.

04 / the measurementWhat you track from now on

Three figures side by side, instead of one.

Always assess the three figures together and at the same fixed point each month: each figure on its own can give a misleading picture, while the combination shows whether a declining click line is loss or a shift towards the answer.

The first measurement is the most important and at the same time the one almost nobody does. How to set it up, with a fixed set of questions and a baseline measurement beforehand, is covered in how you measure AI visibility.

For those this doesn't apply to: if you get your customers from referrals, a fixed circle or one large contract, then a declining visitor line is mainly just a number. You don't need to do anything with it as long as your inflow doesn't depend on it.

This text was produced with AI assistance and checked and approved for publication by a human.