Of course, not for everyone: there are specific segments and niches that did not see such an obvious drop. But several websites have seen reduced visitor numbers after the introduction of AI Overviews.
For those who are unsure about what Gemini is exactly or how it looks, a picture is worth a thousand words:
AI Overviews, which most people know as Gemini, is a Generative AI feature that takes summaries of top Google results and presents them in a summarized form.
Next to these results, the sites that generated this list cell phone number database appear, but instead of 10 as was the SERP's custom, only 3 appear.
In other words: it is natural to expect a drop in both organic traffic and the individual CTR of the results you had on the first page of Google.
In today's article, we'll talk more about this drop, understand why it happens and think about some alternatives to mitigate its impact — and also, of course, how to get around this situation and start gaining new visitors.
The Impact of AI Overviews (Gemini) on Organic Search
The full rollout of AI Overviews came alongside the launch of the overall Gemini platform — around September and October 2024.
It already worked before, but in a limited way and randomly selecting IPs around the world as a way of testing the tool.
Now it is fully operational, and this has had an impact on several segments in Brazil and around the world.
It is still too early to say whether the impact will be X or Y — we need real data.
But that didn't stop Tuya Digital from making a very interesting prediction about the drop in CTR after the introduction of Gemini directly in search:
Source: Tuya Digital
The article listed is quite interesting and deals mainly with a theoretical and statistical analysis. These are not real results — just an approximation.
However, as anecdotal evidence, we are seeing several brands we know reporting a very close drop — around 20% of organic traffic has been lost since Gemini was implemented on the SERP.
Gartner recently released a report outlining some revenue trends by search platform — that is, how much brands can expect to earn from localized efforts on specific sites, such as Google.
See the result:
Source: Gartner
This chart is behind a paywall , but Search Engine Land has a pretty thorough summary.
The figure is a bit worrying. By 2026, brands can expect a 25% drop in their results from Google.
In this regard, the one that suffers the most is organic search, which in many cases will be below AI, below ads, below snippets and with fewer slots in general.
The reason, of course, is exactly what you're imagining: people will prefer AI to do searches.
But be warned: not everyone will prefer it. And even AIs themselves have preferences.
We’ll talk a little more about these AI preferences and what they actually mean at the end of the article. But first, we need to talk a little more about how to mitigate the drop in organic traffic.
Source
Toolkit for assessing and correcting the decline in organic traffic
First of all, it is essential to identify whether your traffic has actually dropped. You can easily check this in Google Analytics.
We have a text here on the blog that deals with marketing reports . If you have questions about checking your traffic, it is a great starting point.
Using Google Analytics, you can make a really cool comparison: I suggest comparing the last quarter of 2024 with the previous one, and then with the first quarter separately.
A quick outline:
Compare late 2024 to mid-2024;
Then compare the end of 2024 with the beginning of 2024;
You'll get two different percentages. If both are decreasing, you may be impacted by the decrease in organic traffic that Google's AI is bringing.
Knowing exactly how much is a bit more difficult. Google’s AI isn’t the only factor causing traffic to drop, after all.
Here in this topic I have brought a quick toolkit to help you evaluate and correct this drop in organic traffic. Come with me:
Understanding the drop in traffic — was it AI or seasonal?
No sensationalism: maybe the drop you’re experiencing on your website isn’t due to AI, but rather to an issue beyond your control — seasonality.
The best way to understand this issue is by analyzing your performance in the previous year and analyzing the traffic of each page individually.
If the drops are proportional on each page — that is, they all dropped by a similar percentage — it’s quite likely that you’re losing traffic due to AI.
Now, if you have seen a drop in specific articles, on your website's home page, on a page that used to bring in a lot of visitors and now doesn't anymore, it could be seasonality.
Use Google Keyword Planner to find out which keywords have reduced traffic. Then, try to understand the SERPs for those keywords.
Are they dominated by AI? Has your page lost rankings?
It’s important to exhaust all possibilities before pointing the finger at AI. With that understood, let’s move on to the next step:
Adjusting what is possible before thinking about AI
Okay, so you’ve identified that the drop in organic traffic was likely caused by AI. Now what?
Well, we'll talk about fixes in the next topic, but first we need to get our house in order — make adjustments directly to the pages you have indexed.
It's completely common for texts to lose positions, and it's quite likely that several of your top performers lost steam throughout the year.
To even begin to think about how to fix this drop in organic traffic, you need to first fix these issues.
Here's a quick outline of what to do:
Make updates to your texts and pages that lost the most positions;
Add more multimedia resources to these texts and pages;
Perform a technical audit on these pages (see how with ScreamingFrog );
Make technical SEO changes based on this audit.
There are only four steps, but they require a lot of work. The links above provide more advanced tutorials.