You are seeing a clear decline in clicks in your Google Search Console report because of one major reason – AI Overviews.
Google’s AI Overview is an advanced search feature that gives direct answers to readers, reducing the need to scroll down and open multiple pages on the Google search results page.
There are reports and industry predictions suggesting that AI Generated answers (AI Overviews and AI citations) could contribute to a significant decline in clicks – even discussed by sources like Gartner and Forbes.
What does this indicate?
While watching clicks coming to your site still feels good, expect limitations based on changing trends, stats, and data over the years.
But this is a clear indication of a new search landscape that values visibility and mentions, not just impressions and clicks anymore.
AI visibility, aka AI brand visibility, is becoming an important layer alongside traditional search rankings.
Can you optimize for AI brand visibility?
Note that AI’s role in the new search landscape is about curating, summarizing, and generating responses quickly.
The responses are fetched from multiple sources, not a single source.
So AI is increasingly about intelligence, not just information anymore.
AI already has access to a lot of data, either through internal training knowledge, indexed web pages, or external data sources through retrieval (RAG), depending on the platform you are using.
There is no one fixed source that AI depends on for summarizing information. It can retrieve information from pages, docs, videos, images, social media content, reviews, discussions, and more.
If you notice responses from models like ChatGPT, many AI brand mentions are brands that have been widely discussed and mentioned across the web over the last decade or more.
It’s not about trusting information from a single source. It’s more about identifying patterns and cross-referencing information across multiple sources.
Since AI connects to diverse data points, and so much information is available, evaluation becomes easier.
AI looks for multiple signals – reviews, ratings, mentions across niche directories, Q&A platforms, media, and more.
Conclusion In simple words:
Don’t try to earn trust from AI. Instead, earn the trust of your audience. AI will follow the same.
