Your agency brings the report: rankings are steady, a few keywords even climbed. Yet organic visitors are down. How can both be true?

Because the results page itself changed. AI summaries that answer the query at the top make it easy for people to leave without clicking. Your position can hold while your click-through rate falls. Here is how to tell whether that is happening on your site.

Recognise the pattern

A loss driven by AI Overviews usually shows three signals together: impressions flat or rising, average position unchanged, and click-through rate falling. If impressions are falling too, look elsewhere first: seasonality, weaker demand, indexing problems or a real ranking loss. Blaming AI without making that distinction leads you to fix the wrong problem.

Checking it in Search Console

• Compare two periods. In the performance report, set the last three months against the same three months a year earlier to remove seasonality.
• Split the queries. Export the list and divide it into informational queries (how, what, why, how many) and commercial ones (price, quote, buy, brand name, "near me").
• Look at CTR change. Flag queries whose position stayed similar but whose CTR dropped clearly.
• Check the results page by eye. Search the flagged queries. Does a summary appear? Are you among its sources?

On most sites the picture is the same: the loss concentrates on informational queries, while commercial ones hold up better. People read the answer to "what is a brand identity" in the summary, but still click through when they search "brand identity design price".

Most of the clicks you lost were not close to a purchase. What matters is knowing which ones remain.

How to read the loss

Informational visitors were still valuable, because that is often where the first contact with a brand happened. So the answer is not to shrug. You need a two-sided plan:

• Be a source in the summary. Even without a click, your brand and link sit on screen before the decision. Shape your pages so summaries can quote them.
• Weight commercial queries. Strengthen service, pricing, comparison and location pages. That is where clicks still happen.
• Change the success metric. Judge organic by forms, calls and sales, not sessions alone. Fewer, better visitors are not bad news.

What should change in reporting

If your SEO report still shows only rankings and sessions, it is not measuring the current search page. At minimum it should show CTR by query type, organic conversions, and whether you are cited in AI summaries for important queries. Visibility in assistants like ChatGPT can be tracked with GEO monitoring.

Frequently asked questions

Does Search Console report AI Overviews traffic separately?

Search Console counts clicks and impressions from AI features within your overall web search performance, and isolating them is not straightforward. The method in this piece, finding queries whose CTR fell while position held and checking the results page by hand, is currently the most reliable route.

How do I separate seasonality from summaries?

Compare year on year. If impressions fell against the same months last year, demand or season is the likely cause. If impressions held and only clicks fell, something on the results page is taking the click, and summaries are the strongest candidate.

Should I replace lost traffic with ads?

Not across the board. Buying back informational visitors with ads is usually expensive and converts poorly. Spend on high-intent commercial queries and on content improvements that get you cited in the summary instead.

If you would like this analysis for your site, start with our search and AI visibility services.