Your rankings held and your clicks fell. That is AI Overviews.
How to confirm AI Overviews is the cause, measure what it took, and decide which content to keep funding.
The signature of the problem
Impressions steady, clicks falling, position unchanged. If your Search Console shows that pattern on the same query group over two quarters, the results page is answering the query before your link gets a turn.
It hits informational queries first, then comparison queries. Transactional and branded queries hold up longest, which is why total traffic can look stable while the top of the funnel quietly empties.
How to measure the damage properly
Group queries by intent, then compare click-through rate before and after the rollout while holding average position constant. The gap between stable impressions and falling clicks is the size of the loss, and it will differ enormously by group.
Do not measure it at site level. A site-level number mixes branded traffic, which is unaffected, with informational traffic, which is where the damage sits.
- Split by intent, not by page
- Hold position constant
- Measure clicks per impression, not sessions
The two responses that work
Become one of the cited sources inside the overview. That means being in the retrieved set: crawlable, well structured, corroborated elsewhere, and clearly the best available answer for that specific question.
Shift content investment towards pages a generated summary cannot replace. Live pricing, configuration, availability, deep comparison, calculators, and anything requiring your own data. Content whose whole job was answering a commoditised question was always going to lose.
What not to do
Do not block Google from using the page for generation. It usually costs more traffic than it saves. Do not thin your content in response, and do not chase every lost query. Chase the ones with commercial intent behind them.
Read next
Other posts: What is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)?Answer Engine Optimization: a practical guideEntity SEO for Indian D2C brandsHow to write content AI engines will citeWhich sources do AI engines cite in India?Programmatic SEO after AI OverviewsLocal SEO and AI answers share the same dataChoosing an SEO agency in India in 2026
Primary sources and further reading
Google documents how AI Overviews and AI Mode select supporting links, and Search Console is where the click and impression evidence for your own site lives.
- Google Search Central: AI features and your website
- Google's guide to optimizing for generative AI features
- Google Search Console
- Google Search Central documentation updates
External links open in a new tab. Our own figures and their limits are published on the method page.
Twenty buying prompts, four engines, you against three named competitors. Report in one working day. No call needed.
AI Overviews and the Indian traffic drop: common questions
Can you opt out of AI Overviews?
Only by blocking Google from using the page for generation, which usually costs more traffic than it saves. The practical path is to become a cited source.
Which queries trigger AI Overviews most in India?
Informational and comparison queries, health and finance queries with caveats, and long-tail how-to phrasing. Branded and checkout-intent queries trigger them least.
How long does recovery take?
Structural and schema fixes ship in about three weeks. Being cited inside overviews usually takes sixty to a hundred and twenty days depending on how much source placement is needed.
See what the engines say about you
Twenty buying prompts, four engines, your brand against three named competitors. Report in one working day.
- 20 buying prompts, your category
- ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Overviews
- You against three named competitors
- Report in one working day, yours to keep