Navigating the AI Overviews Era: Strategies for Declining Organic Search Traffic and the Rise of Zero-Click SEO

If you’ve seen a steady decline in the traffic referrals from Google organic search, you’re not alone. SEO professionals are calling it the “Crocodile mouth effect“, or the “Great Decoupling“. Whatever you call it, this decline in search traffic is likely to become a bigger issue for businesses across the world, as Google rolls out more AI Overviews and it’s AI-first search experience.

AI Overviews are placed above organic search results on Google. As of May 2025, they were found to appear on just under 30% of queries in the USA and 19% of queries in the UK. But this percentage is growing rapidly. Where AI Overviews are present, they may be followed by sponsored search listings and then the organic results.

Google Search Console performance reports show clicks from Google have started to drop, specifically on queries where AI Overviews are present even where impressions have stayed the same or grown.

Why Google search clicks are declining despite growing impressions?

Impressions are increasing because AI Overviews now give companies two chances to log an impression for a given keyword: as a traditional link in the search results, and as a citation in an AI Overview.

Clicks are decreasing because AI Overviews provide the answers that users seek. Searchers can get all the information they need to resolve their query without leaving the search results page. Research from ahrefs found the presence of an AI Overview correlates with a 34.5% reduction in clickthrough rate.

Marketers and SEO professionals must adapt to a shift in search behaviour. As more and more queries are answered within the search results pages, we will see an increase in zero-click searches.

This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, so long as your brand is visible in the AI Overviews.

How to adapt marketing strategies for zero-click searches?

Visibility is the key metric for AI search.

So long as your brand is discoverable when users are searching for information, it may not matter as much if they don’t click through to your website, especially during the awareness and consideration phases of the purchase journey. Here are a few things you can do now to start preparing:

1. Benchmark your AI Overview presence: Pick your most important keywords and document which terms your brand and your competitors are visible for. Also note down the types of content that get mentions and citations.
2. Identify content gaps and opportunities for AI mentions: These may uncover long-term objectives or may highlight urgent areas where immediate attention is needed.
3. Create conversational content for AI Overviews: Understand that this isn’t the same as writing content for SEO, where keyword-based optimisation does the job. AI Overviews consider context in a much wider sense.
4. Test and experiment with content formats and brand placement on third-party resources too. AI search gathers information from the wider web, compiles it, contextualises it, and also compares it against the content on your own site.
5. Measure performance beyond clicks, focus on visibility: Keep in mind that a positive result here might be visibility in the form of a brand mention or a citation, even if neither of those always leads to a click. Don’t mistake falling click-through rates and lower website visits from Google organic search for a drop in performance.

We need to adapt our thinking to a zero-click future, where websites may only serve a very functional purpose. Investing time and resources in GEO is important. As is upskilling marketing teams to improve the entire team’s understanding of the differences between SEO and GEO, and how success will be measured going forward.

Can the Google search traffic drop due to AI Overviews be reversed?

Search behaviour is fundamentally changing, and there’s not a lot brands can do to reverse this trend. Adapting to this changed behaviour rapidly could place you ahead of the curve, though. Traffic – just like social media likes and shares – is fast becoming a vanity metric.

What truly matters for business is visibility and sales. Here are actions you can take now to grow in spite of the search traffic drop:

Invest in GEO

Grow visibility on ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google Gemini. These platforms are growing rapidly and are predicted to outpace search as the main platforms for discovery in the next two years. Generative engine optimisation – or SEO for AI – places your brand in front of users in these AI search tools.

Advertise on AI search

Google has already announced it will show ads within AI Overviews. Perplexity has been testing AI advertising in the USA. Testing these ad offerings early on positions your business for long-term success on these platforms.

Leverage digital PR

Online PR can help boost your brand presence on third-party websites. Not only does this help increase brand awareness and drive additional traffic to your website, but it also can help increase the chances of your brand being mentioned in AI Overviews.

Build community on external forums

External UGC forums such as Reddit also can help increase the chances of your brand being mentioned in AI Overviews, not to mention the increased trust and traffic + awareness boost you can get from a trending post on a popular forum.

While this may seem like a lot of work, and a constantly changing field, you cannot afford to wait and hope. My recommendation is to start with a benchmarking exercise. Once you understand where you need to improve visibility, this can help break down the seemingly daunting task.

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