I get asked a version of the same question most weeks now. A client will open a call by saying their rankings look fine, their content is still there, yet their traffic has dropped without a clear cause. Nine times out of ten, the answer is sitting at the top of the search results page, not further down it.
New figures put a number on something most of us in this industry have felt happening for a while. Similarweb reports that AI Overviews, the summarised answers Google generates above the normal search listings, now appear on around 43 per cent of all searches. Semrush puts the figure closer to 48 per cent. The two firms measure differently, so a gap between them is expected, but the direction of travel is the story here, not the exact decimal point.
From one in six searches to roughly half, in twelve months
This is the part worth sitting with. A year ago, that same coverage figure sat somewhere between 13 and 20 per cent of searches. It has now more than doubled, and on some measures nearly tripled, in a single year. Google is not testing this feature anymore. It has become the default way a large share of searches get answered, and the trend line is still climbing rather than levelling off.
Google’s newer AI Mode, a fuller conversational search experience rather than a summary box, is growing even faster than Overviews did. If Overviews were the warning shot, AI Mode is the sign that Google intends to keep moving in this direction rather than pull back.
Not every search is affected equally
The coverage figure is an average, and averages hide the detail that actually matters to your business. Informational searches, the kind where someone wants an explanation, a definition, or a general answer, are seeing AI Overviews at a noticeably higher rate than the average. Purely transactional searches, where someone already knows what they want and is close to buying, contacting, or booking, are affected less.
This distinction matters more than the headline statistic. A search for “what is professional indemnity insurance” is a different animal to a search for “professional indemnity insurance quote Glasgow.” The first is exactly the kind of query Google can now answer without sending anyone to a website. The second still needs a business at the other end of it.
What this actually means for a business like yours
If a meaningful part of your organic traffic has come from guides, explainers, FAQs, or general advice content, that traffic is under real pressure, and it will keep being under pressure as this percentage rises further. That does not mean the content was wrong to write. It built authority, it earned links, and it still signals to Google that a site knows its subject. What has changed is whether a visitor needs to click through to get their answer.
Where the opportunity has not gone anywhere is anything with a decision attached to it. Pricing, availability, comparisons, local service areas, specific products, and anything that requires a conversation rather than a summary. Those searches are the ones where a website still earns the click, because an AI answer cannot complete the transaction on Google’s behalf.
Three practical steps, not vague ones
Split your content by intent, not by topic. Go through your top organic pages and mark each one as informational or commercial. If a page exists purely to explain something, treat its traffic ceiling as lower than it used to be and stop measuring its success by clicks alone. If a page exists to convert, that is where your writing time, internal links, and update effort should be concentrated first.
Write for the answer, not just the ranking. Google still needs a source to build an AI Overview from, and being that source keeps a brand visible even without a click. Clear, direct answers near the top of a page, proper headings, and specific figures rather than vague claims give Google something usable to pull from and attribute.
Stop judging pages on traffic alone. A page that used to bring in five hundred visits and now brings in two hundred has not necessarily failed. If it is still ranking, still being cited, and the two hundred visitors who do click through are the ones with genuine intent to buy, that is a healthier outcome than the raw traffic number suggests. Look at enquiries and conversions from that page before deciding it needs rewriting.
The honest summary
Search behaviour has changed permanently, and the businesses that treat this as a temporary dip in traffic will lose ground to the ones that treat it as a shift in how visibility works. The good news is that the sites built around genuine expertise and clear commercial pages, rather than thin content chasing volume, are the ones best placed to come through this the right way. If you are not sure which of your own pages fall into which camp, that split is usually the first thing I look at in an SEO audit.
Graig Upton
Graig Upton is a UK SEO and Google Ads consultant with 23 years of hands-on digital marketing experience. Google certified in Ads, Analytics and Conversions, he has helped businesses ranging from local providers to national brands — including Nando's and Financial Times — dominate search and scale their leads. Based in Preston, working with clients across the UK.