Why your site gets fewer clicks from Google’s AI answers

Your site can get fewer clicks from Google even when your business is as visible as before. The reason is that Google now answers right at the top of the results, with AI Overviews and AI Mode. Many people find what they need there and never open a website.

The drop isn’t the same for every kind of search, though. Informational questions are hit hardest, while searches for your business name, searches for a service nearby and searches from people ready to buy or book are usually affected far less. In practice, look at enquiries and not only at visits.

What AI Overviews and AI Mode are, and when they reached Italy

AI Overviews are the AI-written summaries that appear at the top of some searches, with links to their sources. They launched in Italy on 26 March 2025, in Italian, for signed-in adult users.

AI Mode is conversational search, where you ask a question, get a fuller answer with links and can keep going with follow-up questions. It has been available in Italy, in Italian, since 8 October 2025, as a tab on the results page and in the Google app.

In May 2026 Google rebuilt its search box around AI and made it possible to move from an AI Overview into an AI Mode conversation without starting over. In June 2026 it said AI Overviews had over 2.5 billion monthly active users, and AI Mode more than a billion.

These features change often, so what I describe here is the picture as of October 2026.

Why visits drop even when you’re still visible

If the answer is already on the page, fewer people need to click. A Pew Research Center analysis of 900 US adults, run in March 2025, shows it. People who saw an AI summary clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits, against 15% for those who didn’t. Links inside the summary were clicked in 1% of cases.

Google tells another side of the story. It says total click volume to websites has stayed relatively stable and that clicks coming from AI answers are “higher quality”, because people who arrive stay on the site longer. Both can be true at once, with fewer clicks on quick questions and more motivated visitors among those who click.

There’s also an effect your visit numbers can’t see. If Google names your business or cites one of your pages in its answer, someone has seen you without ever reaching your site. That’s visibility without a visit.

Since the end of August 2026 Google has been showing every site owner, in Search Console, how often their pages appear in its AI answers. That lets you measure this visibility, at least in part.

Fewer visits doesn’t necessarily mean fewer customers.

Which searches lose the most clicks, and which far fewer

In the same Pew study, searches starting with words like “who”, “what”, “when” or “why” triggered an AI summary 60% of the time. For searches of one or two words, the figure was only 8%. The picture is fairly clear.

• Informational questions are the searches AI answers most often, such as “How does a tax deduction work” or “What do I need to open a VAT number”. That’s where a generic article loses the most clicks.
• Local searches, such as “plumber in Treviso” or “dentist open on Saturday”, come from people who want to call or visit someone. The map, the business listings and the reviews matter here, so if your Google profile is well kept, the enquiry can reach you without going through your site at all.
• Searches for your name come from people who want you in particular. They tend to be short, and AI rarely gets in the way.
• Searches from people ready to buy or book eventually lead to a site, an online shop or a form. On this front, Google announced in May 2026 that people in the US would be able to book some services straight from search. It’s a direction worth keeping an eye on.

What changes for a business

The biggest change isn’t technical, because it’s about what you look at when you judge your site.

• Measuring enquiries and not visits is the starting point, and by enquiries I mean form submissions, phone calls, quote requests and sales. Google says so too, noting that focusing too much on clicks makes you lose sight of the overall value of your visits. If visits drop and enquiries don’t, the site is doing its job. If visits hold up but enquiries don’t come in, the problem is a different one, and I cover it here.
• Looking after your local presence means having a complete, up-to-date Google Business Profile, with genuine reviews and replies to them. Google recommends keeping it current to show up in AI answers too.
• Writing pages that answer real questions means starting from what customers ask you on the phone and answering the way someone who does the job every day would. Google says people are increasingly looking for first-hand perspectives, in-depth reviews and original analysis, which is everything a summary can’t copy from somewhere else.
• Getting known by name helps, because the more people search for your business directly, the less you depend on how Google summarizes generic searches.
• Becoming a source AI cites is the work called GEO, and I explain it in this article.

What to avoid

The first mistake is to panic and rebuild everything. First work out where the drop is coming from. Visits can fall for reasons that have nothing to do with AI, such as a technical problem, a change to the site or seasonality. Look at which pages are losing traffic too, because if it’s the informational articles while your service pages hold steady, things are less serious than they look.

Another mistake is to flood the site with AI-generated articles. Google treats churning out pages that add nothing for readers as spam, and that’s exactly the kind of content AI answers replace best.

Giving up on SEO is just as wrong. Google’s AI answers draw on the same indexed pages as regular search, with no extra requirements, so a site Google can’t find or understand won’t be cited there either.

How I can help

If your site’s visits have dropped, the first step is working out which pages are affected and whether enquiries have dropped with them. I can go through the data with you and figure out what’s really going on. Then I rebuild the pages that matter, meaning your service pages, the ones that answer your customers’ questions and the ones that bring in enquiries.

The sites I build are fast, readable by search engines and AI, and designed to bring in requests, not just traffic. If you like, tell me what you’re seeing in your numbers.