Are Google AI Overviews Reducing Clicks? What Businesses Should Do

When you search a question on Google, the AI summary at the top has raised the same question for many site owners: If people read the answer there, why would they come to our site? The worry is fair. But the impact isn't the same size for every business.

What are AI Overviews and where do they appear?

AI Overviews are AI-generated answers Google places above the results for some searches, compiled from several sources. Links to the cited sites appear next to or inside the summary. They're showing up more and more often in Turkish searches too.

They don't appear for every query. They show up more for questions starting with “how,” “what” or “why,” for comparisons and for long, sentence-like queries. When you search a brand name, a local query like “vet near me” or something clearly transactional, they often either don't appear or take up less room among map and product results.

Which kinds of searches are hit hardest?

The biggest impact is on informational searches. Someone searching “what pressure should my boiler be at” needs a two-sentence answer, and if the overview gives it, they usually don't click. Some independent analyses published on this topic pointed the same way: on informational queries with an overview, click-through rates for organic results tend to fall.

Commercial searches look different. Someone searching “corporate website prices” or “divorce lawyer in Ankara” is preparing to decide. The overview can give a general idea, but a quote, portfolio, office address and a sense of trust only come from a website. So losses on commercial queries may not be as steep as on informational ones.

For local searches, map results and the Google Business Profile still largely decide.

This split raises an important question for small businesses: How valuable was the traffic you're losing? A boiler service in Kadıköy might get hundreds of visits a month to its “boiler pressure” article. But a large share of those visitors usually want to fix the problem themselves and were never going to call. If the traffic graph drops while phone calls stay level, there's no need to panic.

The value of being cited as a source

Being listed as a source next to an overview may not bring as many clicks as a classic blue link. But it has two benefits.

The first is visibility. Your brand name appears inside or right next to the answer the user is reading. The second is that whoever clicks that link has already read the summary and arrives with a more advanced question. Logically, that visitor is less a casual browser and more someone thinking about the next step.

There's no guaranteed formula for being chosen as a source. Still, there are patterns we've observed: pages that answer the question clearly in the first paragraph, with tidy headings, up-to-date content, and a clear author and business behind them seem to get cited more often. Technically, the page also needs to be crawlable and fast. We covered visibility in AI search in detail in a separate post.

Adapting your content strategy

Don't stop writing informational posts. Change what you expect from them. Their job is now less about bringing big traffic and more about showing expertise, getting cited as a source and moving readers toward the related service.

Shift the weight of your investment toward pages that convert: service pages, pricing pages, location pages and FAQs. An AI overview can give a general answer to “how much does AC maintenance cost in İzmir.” Only your page can meet the need for “a technician who can come to Bornova today.”

Write what an overview can't give. Your own price range and what changes it. Your own process, step by step. Photos you took, real examples of your work, mistakes you see in the field. An AI can compile general knowledge, but it can't know what happens in your workshop or office.

End every informational post with a natural bridge to the related service. A “boiler pressure” article could close with the symptoms that mean it's time to call a technician and the areas you serve.

Reading the impact in Search Console

Impressions and clicks from AI Overviews are counted within general web search data in Search Console's Performance report. For a long time there was no separate filter for them; check the report's filters for the current situation. Even without one, you can read the impact indirectly.

The signal we look for: if a query's average position stays the same while impressions rise and click-through rate falls, an overview is probably showing for it. To see this query by query, compare the last three months to the same period last year in the Performance report, then split queries into two groups: those containing “how, what, why” and those containing “price,” a district name or a service name. If the two groups' click-through rates move in different directions, the picture becomes clear.

The most important check happens outside Search Console. If you track key events in Google Analytics, such as form submissions, phone taps and WhatsApp clicks, see what those numbers do while traffic falls. We explained setting up Search Console and which reports to watch in a separate post.

If traffic falls but inquiries hold, what you lost was mostly visits that never turned into customers. If inquiries are falling too, it's time to revisit your service and location pages.