AI search and your traffic: what AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity actually change
- The biggest losses are informational queries with a short answer: “how”, “what is”, “how many grams”.
- Commercial queries — “order”, “price”, “buy in Kyiv” — were hit far less.
- More impressions, fewer clicks: that is the new normal, not a malfunction.
- The best defence is content that cannot be summarised in one paragraph.
Clients notice it like this: impressions in Search Console are up, clicks are down. It looks like a penalty. It is simply how results behave now.
What changed
Google increasingly puts a generated answer at the top. The reader gets what they came for without visiting a site. In parallel, part of the audience now asks ChatGPT or Perplexity directly — those give an answer too, sometimes with a link to the source.
The result: a page that used to pull visitors on “how long does filler take to dry” pulls fewer and fewer. A page on “buy filler in Kyiv” has barely moved — nobody has worked out how to buy inside an AI answer.
Which pages are exposed
| Page type | Risk | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Short reference, definitions | High | The answer fits entirely in the results page |
| Step-by-step guides | Medium | Some steps get summarised, details still need a click |
| Case studies | Low | Someone else’s experience cannot be paraphrased |
| Pricing, services, contacts | Low | The action has to happen on your site |
What to do
Do not rewrite the whole blog in a panic. Open Search Console and find which pages lost clicks while keeping impressions. Usually it turns out to be three articles out of thirty.
Add what cannot be paraphrased. Your own numbers, screenshots, a specific situation broken down, “we tried this and here is what happened”. A model can restate general knowledge, but not your experience.
Strengthen the commercial pages. If informational traffic drops, your service and case pages carry more weight. That is the part of the site people reach anyway — once they move from “how” to “who should I hire”.
What not to do
Do not block AI crawlers hoping to “protect your traffic”. You will simply vanish from answers that get written anyway — only now without a mention of you. We have a separate piece on getting cited instead.
We will look at your Search Console and tell you which pages genuinely dropped and which just look that way because of seasonality.