AI Overviews Are Filtering Out Bad Traffic

Here is the number everyone quotes: 69% of Google searches now end without a click. Up from 56% a year ago. The AI Overviews rolled out, the zero-click rate spiked, and SEO Twitter erupted in collective mourning for all those precious visits that would never be.

Here is the number nobody quotes: what percentage of those visits converted?

I will tell you. It is very close to zero. Not literally zero, but so close to zero that the distinction is academic. Those weren't customers. Those weren't leads. Those weren't even engaged readers. Those were people who typed a question into Google, clicked the first result because the snippet didn't fully answer them, stayed for eleven seconds, and bounced. They never scrolled. They never clicked anything. They never came back.

And now they don't visit at all, because the AI Overview answered their question, and you are upset about this, and I am here to tell you that you are upset about losing something you never had.

The Vanity Metric You Loved Too Much

There is a concept in economics called Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." The SEO industry discovered this law the hard way, though it has yet to admit it. For two decades, we optimized for traffic. We tracked sessions, users, pageviews. We built dashboards that went up and to the right. We put those dashboards in board decks. We felt good about ourselves.

Traffic became the target. Traffic stopped being a good measure of anything except itself.

Here is what traffic, especially informational traffic, actually measures: the number of times someone clicked a link. That's it. Not interest. Not intent. Not value. Just clicks. And clicks, as we are now discovering, were a byproduct of Google's architectural limitations, not a signal of user engagement.

Google used to show you ten blue links and a snippet. If the snippet didn't fully answer your question (and snippets are short, so they rarely did), you clicked. The click was a tax on information retrieval. You paid it because you had no choice. Now you have a choice. The AI Overview answers the question. You don't need to click. So you don't.

And websites everywhere are screaming about lost traffic, when what they actually lost was a line item on a dashboard that was always more decorative than diagnostic.

The Math on Informational Queries

Let me run some numbers that will make you uncomfortable.

According to industry research on keyword intent, informational queries (how to, what is, why does) typically convert at rates between 0.5% and 2%. Transactional queries (buy, order, sign up, get quote) convert at 5% to 15%. The gap is massive. A factor of 10x to 30x.

Now here is the kicker: AI Overviews appear most frequently on informational queries. Science queries (25.96% trigger rate), Electronics (17.92%), general knowledge. These are precisely the queries where your conversion rate was already approaching zero.

So when you see headlines screaming about 61% organic CTR drop, ask yourself: 61% of what? 61% of traffic that bounced? 61% of visits that never scrolled? 61% of sessions that spent 11 seconds on your page before leaving forever?

You are mourning ghost visitors. You are grieving phantoms.

Who Actually Lost Something

I am not saying AI Overviews hurt no one. They absolutely devastated certain business models. Those business models deserve to be devastated. Let us name them.

Ad arbitrage sites. The sites that ranked for "how many ounces in a cup" or "what year did World War 2 end" and plastered 47 display ads around a single sentence of content. These sites existed to harvest informational queries and sell the traffic to advertisers. The traffic had no commercial intent. The ads had no chance of converting. But the impressions counted, so the money flowed. Google just deleted this entire business model. Good.

Affiliate thin content. The sites that wrote 3,000 words answering "what is the best X" without ever actually testing any X, just to get a query that might lead someone to click an Amazon affiliate link. These sites added no value. They clogged search results with regurgitated specifications and paid reviews. AI Overviews synthesize this crap better than the crap itself. Good riddance.

SEO content farms. The sites that wrote 500 articles about every conceivable variation of "keyword + question word" not because anyone needed those articles but because the algorithm rewarded them. Reports now show traffic drops of 40% to 70% for these sites. This is addition by subtraction. The ecosystem is healthier.

If your business model depended on traffic that never intended to buy anything, your business model was a tariff on Google's inability to answer questions directly. Google fixed the inability. The tariff is gone. This is not a crisis. This is the market correcting.

The Traffic That Remains Is Better

Here is something nobody wants to talk about because it undermines the panic narrative: the traffic that still clicks through has higher intent.

Think about it. If the AI Overview answered someone's question, they don't click. If they still click after reading the AI Overview, it's because they want something more: deeper information, a specific product, a service, a second opinion. That click is now a signal of genuine interest, not a byproduct of information scarcity.

Google's own VP Liz Reid claimed in August 2025 that "average click quality has slightly increased." The SEO community dismissed this as corporate spin. Maybe. But the logic is sound. When you filter out the clicks that never would have converted, the clicks that remain are, almost by definition, higher quality.

This matches anecdotal evidence from anyone paying attention. Conversion rates on organic traffic are stable or rising. Revenue per session is stable or rising. The top line (total traffic) is down. The bottom line (actual business outcomes) is flat. This should tell you everything about what kind of traffic disappeared.

What You Should Actually Track

If AI Overviews broke your metrics, your metrics were broken. Here is what you should actually measure:

Revenue per session. Not sessions. Sessions are vanity. Revenue per session tells you whether your traffic is valuable. If this number is flat or up while total sessions are down, you lost nothing of consequence.

Conversion rate by query type. Segment your traffic by intent. Informational, navigational, commercial, transactional. Track conversion rates for each. If your informational traffic drops 60% but your transactional traffic drops 5%, you know exactly where the AI Overviews are biting and you know it's the traffic that never converted anyway.

Qualified lead volume. Not form fills. Not email signups. Qualified leads. People who actually become opportunities. If this number is stable, your business is fine, regardless of what your traffic graph says.

Customer acquisition cost from organic. If you spent the same on SEO and got the same number of customers, your CAC is unchanged. The traffic in between was just intermediary noise.

The whole point of Goodhart's Law is that you need multiple metrics to avoid gaming any single one. Traffic was a single metric. We gamed it for two decades. Now it's being forcibly replaced by something closer to reality. This is painful. It is also correct.

The Silver Lining Nobody Wants

Here is the uncomfortable truth: you were addicted to a number that made you feel good. That number is being taken away. And like any addict forced into sobriety, you are angry at the thing that took your fix rather than grateful for the clarity it provides.

Traffic was the fix. Traffic went up, you felt good. Traffic went down, you panicked. Traffic drove decisions. Traffic justified budgets. Traffic was the story you told the board.

But traffic was never the point. Customers were the point. Revenue was the point. Business outcomes were the point. Traffic was a proxy, and it was a bad proxy, and now Google is deleting the bad proxy and you are left with something closer to the truth.

The truth is that most organic search traffic was never going to convert. The truth is that informational queries were always a sideshow. The truth is that your SEO program was probably generating a lot less value than your traffic dashboard suggested. You just didn't want to know.

AI Overviews are forcing you to know.

The Real Strategy Going Forward

If you are still reading, here is what to actually do:

Stop crying about traffic. Seriously. Stop. Every minute you spend mourning dead visits is a minute you're not spending on things that matter. The traffic is gone. It was never valuable. Move on.

Double down on transactional and commercial queries. These are the queries where people want to buy things, compare things, hire things. AI Overviews trigger less frequently on these queries. When they do trigger, people still click because they need specifics: pricing, reviews, availability. This is where your SEO budget should concentrate.

Build brand. Branded searches don't get AI Overviews. When someone searches for your company by name, they get your website. No AI summary. No zero-click. Full CTR. The more people search for you specifically, the more immune you are to AI's encroachment. Brand is the moat.

Get cited in the AI Overviews. Brands cited in AI Overviews earn 35% more organic clicks. If you're going to lose traffic to zero-click, at least be the source the zero-click cites. Then you get brand exposure without the click tax, and the people who do click are pre-qualified believers.

Rebuild your analytics from first principles. Start with revenue. Work backwards. How many customers? How many leads? How many qualified visits? How many total visits? The funnel should flow down, not up. Traffic is the widest part of the funnel and the least meaningful. Stop staring at it.

Google is not killing your traffic. Google is revealing that your traffic was already dead. The corpse is just finally being buried. Mourn if you must. Then get back to work on things that matter.

The Gratitude You Owe

I said at the top that Google is doing you a favor. Let me be explicit about why.

For twenty years, SEO operated on a lie. The lie was that traffic equals value. The lie let agencies sell services based on traffic growth rather than revenue growth. The lie let in-house teams justify budgets with graphs that went up and to the right. The lie felt good. The lie was comfortable.

AI Overviews are killing the lie.

They are forcing the industry to answer a question it has avoided for two decades: what is SEO actually worth? Not in traffic. In money. In customers. In outcomes that matter to the business.

If you cannot answer that question, you have a problem. But the problem is not AI Overviews. The problem is that you never knew what your SEO was worth in the first place. You just had a traffic number that let you avoid finding out.

Now you have to find out. Now you have to prove value in terms that matter. Now you have to be honest about what organic search actually delivers.

This is uncomfortable. This is also healthy. And yes, you should be grateful, even if you don't feel like it.

The 69% of searches that end without a click were never your customers. They were never going to be your customers. They were a fiction you told yourself because the fiction felt good.

The fiction is over. The truth is here. What you do with it is up to you.