Published by Optimus Interactive
If your website traffic has quietly been dropping over the last year or two, you are not imagining it, and you are certainly not alone. Some of the biggest brands in digital marketing have watched their organic search numbers fall off a cliff, and the culprit is hiding in plain sight at the top of every Google results page.
It is called Google AI Overviews, and it is fundamentally changing the relationship between search engines and the businesses that depend on them.
What Are Google AI Overviews?
When you type a question into Google today, you have probably noticed that the engine increasingly answers it for you — before you have even clicked a single result. That block of AI-generated text at the top of the page is an AI Overview (previously known as Search Generative Experience, or SGE), and Google has been rolling it out aggressively since May 2024.
The feature now appears in over 200 countries and 40 languages. In the US alone, AI Overviews appeared on 13% of all searches by March 2025 — more than double the 6.5% recorded just two months earlier in January. Google is not slowing down.
The promise to users is simple: get your answer immediately, without the friction of visiting multiple websites. For businesses relying on those clicks to generate leads and revenue, the consequences are profound.
The Numbers Tell a Stark Story
The data emerging from independent research is eye-opening. When an AI Overview appears on a search results page, click-through rates to organic results drop dramatically. Studies show reductions ranging from 34% to 61% depending on the query type and industry. By late 2025, AI Overviews were cutting click-through rates for top-ranking content by an average of 58%.
Put simply: you could rank number one on Google and still receive barely half the traffic you would have two years ago.
The broader picture is just as sobering. Around 60% of all Google searches now end without a single click to any website — a figure that has grown steadily as AI Overviews become more widespread. For every 1,000 searches on Google in the US, research suggests fewer than 360 result in a visit to a non-Google property. The open web is getting a shrinking slice of an enormous pie.
The HubSpot Wake-Up Call
No story illustrates this shift more clearly than what happened to HubSpot. For years, HubSpot was held up as the gold standard of content marketing and SEO. They built their brand on blogging, and it worked — at their peak, they were pulling in around 24 million organic visits per month.
Then the floor dropped out. Between November and December 2024, their monthly organic traffic collapsed from 13.5 million visits to around 8.6 million virtually overnight. By early 2025, that number had fallen further to somewhere between 6 and 7 million — a decline of somewhere between 70% and 80% from their peak.
HubSpot’s CEO, Yamini Rangan, addressed it directly on the company’s earnings call, stating that organic search traffic is declining globally because AI Overviews are giving users their answers directly, meaning fewer people are clicking through to websites.
If it can happen to HubSpot — a company with one of the most sophisticated SEO teams in the world — it can happen to any business that relies on Google traffic. HubSpot was not the only casualty. Learning platform Chegg reported a 49% drop in non-subscriber traffic in the same period and subsequently filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google in February 2025. CNN saw declines of between 27% and 38%.
Which Industries Are Most at Risk?
AI Overviews are not hitting everyone equally. Google’s AI tends to generate overviews for informational queries — questions that start with “how”, “what”, “why” or “best”. Around 88% of queries that trigger an AI Overview are informational in nature.
The sectors seeing the biggest impact include health, education, finance, law, B2B technology, and insurance — essentially any space where people turn to Google to learn something rather than to buy something directly. If your business model depends on attracting people at the top of the funnel through educational blog content, you are in the firing line.
Transactional searches — where someone is ready to buy, are less affected for now. But the trend is clearly moving in one direction.
What Should Your Business Do About It?
This is not a reason to panic, but it absolutely is a reason to act. Here is where smart businesses are focusing their energy.
Shift from traffic to authority. The businesses thriving in this environment are not chasing page views — they are being cited within the AI Overviews themselves. Being referenced inside an AI Overview drives 35% more organic clicks than not being cited. Earning that citation means becoming genuinely authoritative in your niche, not just publishing high volumes of generic content.
Go deeper, not broader. HubSpot’s decline was partly driven by spreading content too thinly across topics unrelated to their core expertise — resignation letter templates and inspirational quotes alongside marketing software guides. Google’s algorithm now rewards deep topical authority and penalises breadth without substance.
Diversify your traffic sources. If Google is your only channel, you are exposed. Email lists, social media audiences, YouTube, podcasts, and paid advertising all give you routes to your audience that do not depend on organic search. The businesses best placed for this shift are the ones that built multiple channels before the crisis hit.
Focus on bottom-of-funnel content. AI cannot replicate specific case studies, client results, pricing comparisons, or content that speaks directly to someone who is ready to make a decision. That is where your content investment should be going.
The Bottom Line
Google’s AI Overviews represent a structural shift in how search works, not a temporary blip. The era of building a business almost entirely on informational blog content ranking in Google is effectively over for most companies.
The good news is that this creates opportunity for businesses willing to adapt. Those who move now — diversifying their traffic, deepening their content, and building genuine authority — will be far better positioned than those waiting to see how it plays out.
At Optimus Interactive, we help businesses navigate exactly these kinds of shifts. If your traffic has taken a hit or you are concerned about what comes next, get in touch and let’s talk about what the right strategy looks like for you.
