In this article
AI tools now summarise content from thousands of websites and deliver direct answers without always linking back to the source. Here’s what the traffic data actually shows, which content is most exposed, and what to do about it.
Contents
What’s actually happening · The numbers behind the risk · Which content is most at risk · Which AI tools are taking the most traffic · How to measure your own exposure · What to do about it · Frequently asked questions
In May 2024, Google rolled out AI Overviews to hundreds of millions of users. By early 2025, the education platform Chegg had filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google, citing a 49% decline in non-subscriber traffic over the preceding 12 months. The quarterly trajectory tells the story: 8% down in Q2 2024, 19% in Q3, 37% by October. Chegg’s content didn’t get worse. Its rankings didn’t collapse. AI Overviews started answering the questions that previously sent students to Chegg’s site, and those students stopped clicking.
This is now a pattern across industries. Marketing teams are watching the same thing: stable rankings, rising impressions, and a click-through rate that keeps falling. Often, the loss doesn’t show up cleanly in analytics, because AI tools frequently don’t pass referrer data. What looks like “direct traffic” in your dashboard may be users who heard about you from an AI and Googled your name separately. This is as much a measurement problem as a traffic problem.
What’s actually happening
AI tools, including Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, answer user questions by summarising content from the web, often without linking to the source. A user gets a complete answer without visiting any website. High search intent, satisfied by the AI, no click made.
Traditional SEO assumed ranking well equals traffic. That assumption is under pressure. Ranking on page one still matters, but whether a user clicks through now depends on whether the AI above your listing already answered their question. For informational queries, it increasingly has.
There’s an important distinction worth drawing: traffic loss and visibility loss are not the same thing. You can lose traffic while gaining visibility if AI tools cite your brand without linking to it. That’s a different problem from being ignored entirely, and it requires a different response. For a deeper look at how competitors show up in ChatGPT while your brand doesn’t, the mechanics are worth understanding on their own terms.
“Being cited by AI is the new ranking on page one. The question is whether your content is structured for it.”
Shout Digital, AI search and GEO practice
The numbers behind the risk
Gartner predicted in February 2024 that traditional search engine volume would drop 25% by 2026, driven by AI chatbots displacing queries that previously went to Google. That deadline is now, and the data from the past two years suggests the prediction was directionally correct.
Sources: Gartner press release Feb 2024; Seer Interactive AIO CTR Study Sep 2025 (25.1M impressions, 3,119 queries); SparkToro/Similarweb clickstream data Jan–Apr 2026.
The most rigorous CTR study available comes from Seer Interactive, which analysed 25.1 million impressions across 3,119 queries from June 2024 to September 2025. When a Google AI Overview appeared, organic CTR fell from 1.76% to 0.61%, a 61% decline. When an AI Overview sits above your listing, roughly two-thirds of the clicks you would previously have received no longer happen.
SparkToro, using Similarweb clickstream data from January to April 2026, found that 68% of US Google searches ended without a click. That figure was 60% in 2024. The acceleration maps directly to AI Overviews expanding from under 5% of US searches in early 2024 to over 25% by early 2026.
There’s a flip side worth knowing. Brands cited inside AI Overviews earn 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks than brands not cited on the same queries (Seer Interactive, September 2025). The traffic is compressing, but it’s also concentrating. The brands inside the AI answer are pulling away from the brands ranked below it.
Which content is most at risk
Informational content carries the highest exposure. “What is,” “how to,” definition, and comparison queries trigger AI-generated answers at a rate of 40–50%, compared to under 4% for e-commerce and transactional queries.
Blog posts, guides, and explainers. These see 30–40% organic traffic declines on average where AI Overviews appear. Ahrefs found 99.2% of keywords that trigger AI Overviews have informational intent.
“Best X for Y” pages and vendor evaluation content. B2B technology queries see AI Overviews trigger 70% of the time, making this significant exposure for SaaS and finance brands.
AI Overviews appear on only 4% of transactional queries. Google has a clear commercial incentive to preserve clicks for purchase-intent searches.
The practical diagnostic: open Google Search Console, filter your highest-traffic informational pages, and compare impressions versus clicks over 12 months. Rising impressions alongside falling CTR is click compression from AI Overviews, not a ranking problem.
Which AI tools are taking the most traffic
Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini each operate with different citation behaviour and different scale. Understanding the differences matters for how you respond.
Reach over 1.5 billion monthly users and appear on approximately 25% of all US Google searches. For most Australian businesses, this is the single largest source of click compression, because it operates inside the search page users were already on.
Drives 87.4% of all measurable AI chatbot referral traffic to websites (Conductor, 2026). ChatGPT often cites brands as text mentions rather than hyperlinks, building brand recognition without a measurable referral session. Since June 2025, ChatGPT appends utm_source=chatgpt.com to outbound links, which helps with tracking.
Always includes cited sources with links and averages 21.9 citations per response, more than double ChatGPT’s 10.4. Perplexity traffic converts at a higher rate than traditional organic, making it a high-value surface despite its smaller volume.
Integrated into Google Search and Google Workspace, so its reach scales with Google’s existing user base. It powers AI Overviews directly, making it the most consequential platform for Australian brands relying on organic search.
How to measure your own exposure
There is no single dashboard that shows exactly how much traffic AI tools are diverting. Three data sources, used together, give you a reliable picture.
The clearest signal. Filter your top informational pages and compare CTR over 12 months. Search Console added a Search Appearance filter for AI Overviews in mid-2025; use it to isolate queries where an AI result appeared above your listing.
AI tools frequently don’t pass referrer data. ChatGPT only began appending UTM parameters in June 2025; Perplexity and Claude don’t do this consistently. If your direct traffic is rising while organic falls, AI referrals without attribution are a likely explanation.
Brands that appear in AI answers often see a rise in branded search volume even as overall organic traffic declines. Users encounter your brand name in an AI response, then Google your name to verify. Growing branded queries alongside slipping non-branded traffic is a strong signal that AI tools are driving awareness without the click.
Shout Digital tracks AI citation share separately from traffic, measuring how often a brand appears in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews responses for a monitored set of queries each month. It gives a leading indicator of whether the visibility work is compounding, independent of whether citations convert to clicks in the same session.
What to do about it
Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) and Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) are built specifically for this shift. GEO structures content so AI models choose it as a source. AEO optimises for direct answers in conversational AI interfaces. Both build on SEO rather than replacing it.
The core point from the citation data: this is not a binary choice between traffic and AI visibility. Brands cited inside AI Overviews earn more organic clicks and more paid clicks than brands ranked below them on the same queries. Being the cited source is the best available position for the queries that matter most. If you want to understand what GEO involves in practice, the mechanics go deeper than content structure alone.
Clear answer capsules, question-format subheadings, and explicit attribution make content easier for AI systems to extract and cite.
Third-party coverage and consistent presence on platforms like Clutch and G2 build the corroboration AI models weight heavily. Learn more about building topical authority so AI tools recommend your brand.
Monthly measurement of brand mention rate and citation share across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.
Ensuring AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, OAI-SearchBot) are not blocked in robots.txt and that content is served as static HTML rather than client-side rendered JavaScript.
If your traffic has been sliding while your rankings haven’t moved, AI-generated answers are likely taking a share. Shout Digital’s AI search and GEO service identifies which queries are being diverted and builds a plan to get your brand cited rather than just summarised. Our team measures AI citation share across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews for every client, so the work has a clear feedback loop from day one.
Frequently asked questions
Updated June 2026. Shout Digital is a Melbourne-based digital marketing agency offering SEO, SEM, Social Media, Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO), and Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) for growth-stage and established Australian brands. Data sources: Gartner press release February 19, 2024; Seer Interactive AIO CTR Study January 2025 and September 2025 update (3,119 queries, 25.1M impressions, 42 organisations); SparkToro/Similarweb zero-click research January–April 2026; Chegg Inc. antitrust complaint February 2025; Conductor AI referral benchmarks 2026.
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