Did AI Search Tank My Traffic? How to Actually Find Out [WEBINAR]

If your organic traffic has dropped, you’ve probably already heard the explanation: AI Overviews. And while that can often be part of the story, it’s not always the whole story, and defaulting to that answer without digging into the data can send your team chasing the wrong solution. 

That was the core message of our recent webinar, hosted in partnership with Slator, where Intero Digital’s Brittni Ratliff and Cosima Compton helped attendees answer the question “Did AI Overviews Tank My Traffic?” by walking through a practical framework for diagnosing traffic loss, identifying what’s actually driving it, and figuring out what to do next. 

The concern is legitimate. Clients across industries have reported traffic losses since AI Overviews began rolling out, and Business Insider and its affiliate network saw a 55% decline in traffic after AI Overviews entered the picture. Today, AI Overviews appear on roughly 48% of searches. 

But AI Overviews have become an easy catch-all to blame, which means other root causes, such as algorithm updates, tracking issues, site migrations, or plain old seasonality, get missed. The webinar was designed to help marketers and their teams tell the difference. 

Cosima walked through a four-part process for identifying what’s actually happening when organic metrics take a hit: 

1. Is the drop real?
   Before anything else, verify that you’re not looking at a tracking problem. Is your analytics implementation still intact? Did something change on the site around the same time? Are you seeing the decline in both Google Analytics and Google Search Console?
2. When did it happen, and what was the context?
   Time the drop against known Google algorithm updates and your own site change history. A sharp drop that coincides with a core update is more likely an algorithm issue than an AI Overviews issue.
3. Where in the buyer’s journey is the loss occurring? 
   Informational and definitional queries tend to be the first to lose ground to AI Overviews. Commercial and branded queries are more resilient but not immune. Knowing which query types are down can tell you a lot about the cause.
4. Does the data actually point to AI Overviews?
   The clearest signal: Impressions are holding steady or climbing in Search Console while clicks are declining. That divergence, sometimes called an “alligator graph,” suggests users are seeing your content in the SERP but getting their answer from AI Overviews before they ever click through. 

Brittni and Cosima walked through three real-world situations and what to do in each: 

Situation 1: Informational content is taking the biggest hit. 

If definitional and how-to queries are down significantly and impressions are decoupling from clicks, AI Overviews is the likely the cause. The goal shifts from winning the click to winning the citation. That means structured, passage-based content with direct answers, original data, named subject matter experts, and properly implemented schema markup. 

Situation 2: Commercial pages are declining, not just blog traffic. 

If both impressions and clicks are falling and the drop date aligns with a Google core update, this probably isn’t an AI Overviews problem. Start with an EEAT audit, review SERP features, and look honestly at the user experience and trust signals before making any major changes. 

Situation 3: Traffic is down, but revenue isn’t. 

This one might not be a crisis at all. If sessions are declining but conversions are flat or growing, AI Overviews might simply be filtering out lower-intent visitors. That’s worth reframing with your leadership team. The quality of traffic matters more than quantity in this environment. 

Both speakers pushed back on sessions as the headline metric. It’s a partial view, and in the current environment, year-over-year session data is probably going to look bad. What should replace it: 

• Revenue from organic and assisted conversions across the funnel 

• Impressions from Search Console, which now include AI Overviews appearances 

• Branded search volume as a visibility proxy 

• Citation share of voice across priority queries, using tools like BrightEdge, Semrush, Spotlight, or Profound 

For teams without budget for newer tools, a monthly manual check of your top revenue-driving queries across AI tools in an incognito browser can give you a read on where you’re showing up and where you’re not. 

There’s so much more in the full conversation, including a walkthrough of how to restructure content for citation and guidance on how to communicate all of this to leadership. Watch the full webinar recording to unlock everything Brittni and Cosima covered.