Are AI Overviews Costing You Clicks?

Everybody has read a headline about AI killing search traffic. Almost nobody has checked whether it happened to them.

It is worth checking, because the answer for a local trade business is usually narrower and less alarming than the headline.

What an AI Overview actually is

It is the summary Google writes above the normal results, drawn from several pages and citing them. Google documents the various AI features in Search and how pages become eligible to appear in them.

The important thing is when it shows up. It is far more common on questions than on hiring intent.

The two kinds of search, and only one is at risk

Research searches. How long does a bathroom take. What causes a boiler to lose pressure. Do I need a licensed sparky for this. These are questions, and a question is exactly what an AI Overview exists to answer. If you were getting traffic from these, some of it is gone.

Hiring searches. Emergency plumber near me. Electrician in Rolleston. Fencing contractor quotes. These produce a map and a list of businesses, because the person does not want a fact, they want somebody to turn up. An AI cannot do the job, so there is nothing for it to answer.

Nearly all of your actual work comes from the second kind. That is the part worth understanding before you panic about the first.

There is a middle group worth watching, which is the question that ends in hiring somebody. What does an emergency call-out cost at the weekend. Is a leaking cylinder urgent. Those can get summarised, and they are the ones where losing the click actually costs you something, because the person asking was most of the way to picking up the phone.

How to check what actually happened to you

Ten minutes in Search Console, no tools required.

1. Open Performance and set the range to the last 16 months
2. Turn on both Clicks and Impressions
3. Look at the shape of the two lines against each other

Then read it:

• Impressions steady or up, clicks down. You are appearing and not being clicked. Something is answering ahead of you, and AI Overviews are a plausible cause.
• Both down. This is a visibility problem. You slipped, or a competitor improved. The AI is not your culprit and fixing the wrong thing will not help.
• Both up. Nothing to see. Carry on.

Then go a level deeper, because the headline shape hides which searches moved.

Open the Queries tab, compare the last three months against the same three months a year ago, and sort by the change in clicks. Read the twenty biggest fallers and sort them into two piles: questions, and searches with a town or "near me" in them.

If the fallers are nearly all questions, that is the Overview and it is working as described. If the fallers are hiring searches with place names in them, the AI is not your problem and something more urgent is: you have lost position in the results that actually bring work.

One warning on average position: it will often look better while clicks fall, because an Overview pushes the normal results down without changing where you sit among them. Do not read a stable position as a sign that nothing happened.

What to do if it is real

Not much changes, and that is the unsatisfying part.

Answer the question better and earlier on the page. If you are going to be quoted, be the one quoted. A direct answer in the first two lines, then the detail, is both what an AI lifts and what a reader wanted.

Write for the questions that end in hiring somebody. "What does an emergency call-out cost at the weekend" has a buyer behind it. "Why do pipes bang when the tap turns off" has a curious person behind it. Both are questions; only one of them rings.

Make the click worth making. An Overview summarises. It cannot show your photos of the job, your reviews, your service area or your number. If your page offers nothing beyond the answer, there was never a reason to click through.

Put your name in the answer. If you are going to be quoted, be quoted as somebody rather than as a passage. Naming the business, the trade and the area inside the sentence that gets lifted means the summary carries your name even when the click does not happen.

The part that is genuinely annoying

You cannot opt out without also disappearing from ordinary results, which is not a trade any local business should make.

And you cannot measure it cleanly. Search Console does not break out Overview impressions separately, so you are reading a shape rather than a number. Anyone showing you a precise figure for traffic lost to AI is estimating, whatever the dashboard says.

What I would actually do about it

For most trade businesses: very little, beyond what the search work already involves. The searches that bring the jobs in are the least affected ones, and the map results sit above the Overview anyway.

What has genuinely changed is further out: more people are asking an AI before they ask Google at all, and that is a different problem with a different answer. This one, for a local service business, is mostly a headline.