What's actually working for traffic post-AI Overviews?

ryanseo

Zero-click searches are killing informational traffic - we're seeing the same drop-off. Even the basic SEO playbook feels like it's failing when AI can answer queries directly without a click.

Curious what's actually moving the needle now. Here's what I'm testing:

Building a strong brand presence outside search - communities, podcasts, forums where people discuss topics.
Creating content with unique, first-hand insights that AI can't just scrape from a SERP.
Leaning into YouTube and video - longer watch time seems to hold value.
Chasing AI citations - getting referenced by Claude, Perplexity, or Google's own AI Overviews.
Newsletters as a way to own the audience directly, bypassing search altogether.
Traditional SEO still has a pulse for transactional queries, but informational? Brutal.

Someone in the community mentioned that visibility is shifting from ranking pages to being a trusted reference source - both for people and for the AI models. That rings true.

Would love to hear real experiences - what's driving traffic for you now?

miaaffiliate

Zero-click searches have completely wrecked the basic SEO playbook. Even the click-through rates we used to rely on are barely scraping by now. Honestly, if you're still putting all your eggs in that basket, margins are going to take a hit. I've shifted most of my affiliate traffic to paid channels and direct response-things that actually convert without relying on Google's whims.

tiktokguru

We're seeing exactly the same thing on our side. Informational traffic has taken the biggest hit - AI just nicks the answer before anyone even clicks 📉

What's been working for us lately:

‣ Building a recognisable brand that people actually trust
‣ Creating content with genuine, first-hand insight - not just rewrites
‣ Being active where conversations happen (communities, forums, podcasts, LinkedIn groups)

SEO is still part of the mix, but the real shift feels like it's moving from "rank a page" to "be the trusted source that people and AI choose to reference."

harper-local

Honestly, AI Overviews have been a wake-up call for local businesses too. The days of relying on a generic "plumber near me" post and expecting clicks? Gone. Google's summaries steal those top-of-funnel queries outright now.

What's worked for me? Stop chasing informational keywords that a snippet can kill. Focus on the map pack and review generation instead. If you've got a solid Google Business Profile with real, recent reviews and local citations that actually match up, you're still getting calls. AI can't replace a five-star rating from a neighbour who mentions your name.

I've shifted almost entirely to attribution via call tracking. Foot traffic? That's the real metric. If AI overviews summarise "best restaurant in X", but your GBP has 200 reviews and photos of happy punters, they still click through to book a table. That's where the value is now.

Also stopped obsessing over blog traffic. Instead, leaned into what locals actually search for: "open now", "near me", "same day service". Those intent-rich queries still convert. And branded search? That's gold. If someone types your company name instead of a generic term, they're ready to buy.

Bottom line: stop fighting AI summaries. Build a GBP that's impossible to ignore, get real reviews, and invest in distribution through local community groups, Nextdoor, and Instagram. Diversification isn't optional anymore. It's survival.

sophiasaas

We're optimising for AI overviews too. Found it easier using a dedicated GEO tool-Blazly's free version helped us get traffic from those snippets. Just search 'generative engine optimization tools' and you'll see it.

neonlights

For us, traffic didn't drop-it just shifted channels. Some blog posts lost clicks, but branded search and direct visits climbed noticeably. Community mentions also spiked. Feels like Google's become a verification layer rather than a discovery engine, people find the thing elsewhere, then check it on search. Activation's still strong, just harder to attribute to a single touchpoint.

pixelpusher

Honestly, pivoting to transactional intent is the only play that still works. But don't kid yourself - those "questions" in the search bar are just long-tail keywords wearing a trench coat. Same game, different wrapper

liamcopy

Reddit and a blog. That's my traffic cocktail. Works every time.

dailygrind

Honestly, the AI Overview shift isn't as disastrous as people think if you reframe your strategy. the average buyer journey in B2B SaaS is roughly two weeks now - sometimes longer if the deal size is substantial. That means the click in the overview isn't the endgame, it's just the first touchpoint.

here's how I've been tackling it:

Audit your content for overview eligibility - Use GSC and Ahrefs to spot where your pages appear in the overviews. if you're not there, you're invisible. But if you are, you have a slot to build brand familiarity.
Optimise for brand impression, not just click-through - Structure the snippet so it includes your unique value prop and a subtle differentiator. Think: "We help fintechs reduce churn by 30%" rather than generic advice. The goal is mental availability when they're ready to buy.
Track branded search lift - If you're doing this right, you should see a rise in direct traffic or branded queries over the following weeks. that's the true signal that the overview exposure is converting down the line.

someone in the thread mentioned that all you need is the one click at decision time - dead right. even if you're third in a list of five, if you've been the most consistent and clear voice, that's the name they type into the search bar when they're ready to hand over the budget.

wordweaver

Oh honey, preach. Informational traffic is basically dead in the water now-Meta and Google both want you to buy or compare, not just "learn." We're seeing the same: ditch the fluffy "What is X" guides and lean into comparison showdowns, problem-specific deep dives, and decision-making content. that's where the intent is.

chatbox

Focusing on branded search and newsletters has been my main play since the AI Overviews rollout. I've been digging into this with GSC data, and it's clear that if someone specifically searches for your brand name, the Overviews barely touch those clicks. We've shifted away from broad informational queries that can be flattened into a paragraph, and instead doubled down on community channels where nuance actually matters. Screaming Frog crawls are a lot leaner now, but newsletter open rates tell a better story than organic impressions ever did.

trendspotter

It's like watching a once-vibrant garden get choked by ivy. All those fluffy, top-of-funnel blog posts-the ones that used to bloom with "10 ways to..." and "ultimate guides"-they're just withering. The informational queries that fed them have been swallowed whole by those glossy AI summaries. What's left standing now? Only the sturdy, deeply-rooted brand queries-the ones people type when they already know the name, when they're already halfway down the funnel. The generic content era wasn't just dying, it was on life support. AI Overviews just yanked the plug.

bigcoffee

Relying on just SEO is a losing play now. Winners have multiple discovery channels: Reddit, YouTube, email, brand. Each supports the others - compounding growth, not linear.

leadgen

A colleague asked me the same thing last week. Honestly, most of my energy goes into brand building on social now - proper content distribution, not just posting for the sake of it. Feels like the only way to cut through when AI overviews are swallowing the SERP real estate.

olivia-roas

honestly, I'm sceptical of that take. If you're getting traffic from AI overviews without doing anything special, you're either already sitting on a mountain of Google reviews or you're in a low-competition niche where the AI has nothing better to pull from. i've scaled six-figure Meta budgets and seen clients get a minor bump when their review snippets show up in those summaries, but it's not something you can replicate at scale. For anyone running paid, this changes nothing unless your organic reputation is already carrying the weight. relying on AI overviews without a solid testing pace is a fast track to ad fatigue and wasted spend

chatbox

Same story here for my B2B SaaS clients - that informational traffic has taken a hit. What's moving the needle now?

Branded search - push demand via LinkedIn and partners.
YouTube for 'how-to' and product use cases - Google still surfaces these in AI Overviews.
Chase AI citations deliberately. Use SEOforGPT to track where clients appear in ChatGPT and Perplexity, then map content to fill the gaps.
Community answers - Quora, niche forums. That's replaced a lot of old top-of-funnel SEO.

Add technical SEO basics (Screaming Frog audits, index bloat fixes) and you'll recover some ground.

noahcontent

I ran a celebrity photos site from 2010 to 2014. Then Google changed image search - users no longer needed to click through to see the full image. Traffic vanished overnight. Same dynamic happening now with AI Overviews: the platform keeps the user, the publisher starves. The lesson? Build for owned audiences (email, RSS, newsletter), not search-dependent traffic that can be switched off with one update.

ryanseo

Traffic isn't dead - it's just changing where it lives. Zero-click searches are climbing, but that doesn't mean SEO is broken. The game is shifting from pure click-chasing to brand visibility and presence inside AI answers. Clicks still come thick and fast for intent-driven queries - think transactional, local, or "near me" stuff. The real pain is for informational content that used to land top 3 and now sits in a featured snippet nobody clicks.

Been running tests on a few programmatic sites since AI Overviews rolled out wider in the UK. Here's what I'm seeing:

For "how to" queries with clear steps, Google is pulling the answer straight into the overview. CTR drops 30-50% on those positions. But if you structure your page to be the source that gets cited, you still win brand impressions and referral links.
For commercial queries like "best XYZ under £100", clicks are holding steady. People still want to compare and buy.
Brand searches from AI overviews - users who see your name in the answer and then type it into search - those are up around 15% in my data.

So it's not a cliff. It's a pivot. The sites that adapt - schema markup, clear entity relationships, authoritative backlink profiles - are still pulling organic traffic. The ones that relied on thin content and keyword stuffing are getting hammered. Patience and architecture matter more than ever.

brandvoice

Exactly this.

So many people only look at the immediate conversion, the last click that shows up in their analytics. They forget that every single touchpoint before that - the email they opened two weeks ago, the subject line that made them think "oh, that brand gets me" - is doing the real heavy lifting.

We track opens and clicks religiously, but we rarely measure the quiet work of familiarity. That first mention plants a seed. The last click just harvests it.

In the age of AI overviews stealing the top-of-funnel search traffic, that deep relationship building through email matters more than ever. People buy from brands they recognise and trust - and that trust isn't built in one click.