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19 October 2026

What Google’s AI Overviews Mean for Your Website Traffic

“We’re showing up more than ever, so why aren’t we getting more clicks?” It’s a fair question. Picture an accountancy practice whose page on self-assessment deadlines used to sit near the top of Google. Now an AI-written summary appears above it, answers the basic question in a few lines and tucks some source links underneath. Some people still click through. Plenty don’t need to.

That summary is what Google calls an AI Overview. It isn’t going anywhere, and AI Mode started rolling out in the UK in July 2025 as its own tab for longer, back-and-forth questions. So you need a clear idea of what Google has actually said about both, how pages get cited, and how to read what’s happening to your traffic without panicking.

In brief

You don’t need special files, tags or an ‘AI SEO’ trick to appear. Google says ordinary good SEO is what counts.
Every link inside an AI Overview shares one position in Search Console, so the position figures can look odd.
There’s now a Search Console report just for impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode.
Judge it on enquiries and sales. Clicks on their own only tell you part of the story.

What AI Overviews and AI Mode actually are

Both are features in Google Search that write an answer with AI and show links next to it. AI Overviews appear above the normal results for some searches. Not all of them. Google only shows one when its systems decide it adds something to the classic results, so plenty of searches won’t show one. AI Mode is the bigger sibling. It’s built for questions with several parts, comparisons and follow-ups, and in the UK it sits as a separate tab on the results page.

The clever bit is something Google calls ‘query fan-out’. Ask AI Mode which boiler suits a three-bed semi with a loft conversion and it won’t just run that one search. It splits the question into smaller pieces, searches for each and gathers supporting pages from all of them. That’s why the links can be wider and more varied than the usual list of results. It also means a heating engineer’s page on system boilers could end up cited against a question it was never written to answer.

The two features may use different models too. The links in an AI Overview and the links in AI Mode for the same topic won’t always match.

Why your traffic might look different

So what happens to the clicks? Some searches that used to send people to a website now get answered on the results page. Opening times. A quick definition. Whether a shop delivers to a particular postcode. When the answer fits in two lines, some people will read it and move on.

Google’s line is that the clicks that do come through are better ones. It says people clicking from results pages with AI Overviews are more likely to spend more time on the site. That’s Google reading its own data, so take it as Google’s claim and check it against your own figures.

What it means for you depends on what your pages do. A restaurant page that only lists opening hours was always going to be answered for free somewhere. A page that helps someone choose, compare or book is a different animal. Nobody settles on a commercial roofer or a wedding venue from a two-line summary. They want detail, photos, prices and an easy way to get in touch.

How to give your pages a chance of being cited

This is where the hype runs into Google’s own documentation. Google says there are no extra requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. You don’t need new machine-readable files, ‘AI text files’ or special markup. The page has to be indexed and eligible to show in Search with a snippet. After that the same advice applies as always, and none of it guarantees you a spot.

So the basics end up doing double duty. Googlebot has to be able to crawl the site, and a host or CDN setting can block it without anyone noticing. Important pages need links pointing at them. Keep the important stuff in text. A price list that only exists as a picture is much harder for anything to read. Any structured data has to match what’s visible on the page, which we cover in our piece on schema markup for business websites. Decent photos and video help back the words up. Shops should keep their Merchant Center feed current, and any business with a Business Profile should keep it up to date. A good page experience matters here too.

Then there’s the content itself. Google’s helpful content questions ask whether a page offers original information, research or analysis, and whether it gives insight beyond the obvious. A thin page that says what every competitor says gives a summary nothing to point at. A manufacturer that publishes real tolerances and lead times has something to cite. So does a physio clinic that explains exactly what happens at a first assessment. Our article on writing website copy people actually read goes into how to get there, and our guide to how SEO works for a business website lays out the rest of the groundwork.

Can you stop Google using your content?

Partly. If you’d rather a page didn’t feed AI answers, the controls are the ordinary Search ones. ‘nosnippet’, ‘data-nosnippet’ and ‘max-snippet’ limit how much of a page Google shows, and ‘noindex’ keeps the page out altogether. These are Search-wide controls, mind. Block the snippet and you lose it in the normal results as well.

You’ll also hear about Google-Extended. It’s a robots.txt setting for whether Google can use your content to train future Gemini models and for grounding in some of its other systems. Google says it doesn’t affect whether a site is included in Search and isn’t used as a ranking signal. It isn’t the switch for AI Overviews. Those are part of Search, so they follow the normal Googlebot rules and the snippet controls above.

For most businesses, hiding from AI answers makes little sense anyway. You want to be the page they cite.

Reading the numbers in Search Console

This is where a lot of the worry starts. Traffic from AI Overviews and AI Mode sits in the Search Console Performance report under the ‘Web’ search type, right alongside your ordinary results. Click through to your page from an AI Overview and it counts as a click. Position is the odd one. An AI Overview takes up a single position on the results page, and every link inside it is given that same position. In AI Mode, position works the same way as on an ordinary results page, and each follow-up question is treated as a new query.

Google has also added a Generative AI performance report. It shows how often links to your site appeared in AI Overviews and AI Mode, which pages earned those impressions, and splits them by country, device and date. Google says it had rolled out to all websites worldwide by 31 August 2026, though a site without enough AI impressions may not see it. The help page only talks about impressions. For clicks you’re back in the main Performance report. Experiments in Search Labs aren’t counted anywhere in Search Console.

What to measure beyond clicks

Clicks are a poor finish line. A holiday cottage business that loses a chunk of clicks on ‘things to do nearby’ but keeps its bookings steady hasn’t lost anything that pays the bills. Google itself points to tools like Analytics for conversions and time spent on the site. Set up GA4 key events for the actions that matter to you, like the enquiry form, the phone tap or the order. Our walkthrough on tracking enquiries with GA4 key events shows how.

Then compare like with like. Look at the pages that bring in work, month by month. Find the searches that lost clicks but held on to impressions, and ask whether those were ever the searches that made you money. Losing clicks on ‘how long does a boiler service take’ won’t hurt much. Losing them on ‘boiler service near me’ would. And if a page earns plenty of impressions but few clicks, its title and snippet might need attention, which our article on how Google builds title links and snippets explains.

Getting some help with it

None of this needs a gimmick. Mostly it needs pages that answer properly, a site Google can crawl and someone keeping an eye on the right numbers. If you’d like a hand, our SEO services start from the same basics Google points to, and we look at visibility in AI answers as part of that work. Or talk to us about your Search Console data and we’ll tell you what we’d look at first.

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Sources

Scott Woodfield

Founder of TWA, Scott harbours over 10 years of digital marketing agency experience. Everything from removing a background of an image to full blown ecommerce solutions from the ground up, Scott's your go to guy for anything marketing & web.

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