AEO
AI Overviews took my traffic. Is my SEO broken?
This is the most common panic of the moment, and the diagnosis matters because the two possible causes have opposite responses.
Check impressions against clicks
Open Search Console and compare the two lines. If impressions are flat or rising while clicks fall, your rankings are fine and the answers are being given before the links.
If impressions are falling too, that is an actual ranking problem and this article is not your issue.
Which pages lose and which do not
The losses concentrate on question-shaped informational queries with a clean answer. Those are exactly the ones an overview can resolve completely.
What holds up is commercial intent. Nobody chooses a contractor, a dentist or an agency from a paragraph of generated text. They still click, still compare, still call. If your traffic drop is concentrated in blog posts while your service pages are steady, that is the expected shape and not a crisis.
What to change
Not much, and not in a panic. Keep writing informational content, because it is what builds the credibility that gets you named in the first place, but stop judging it purely on sessions.
Put more weight on pages that answer questions a paragraph cannot close. Anything involving your specific situation, your city, your constraints, or a decision with trade-offs still needs a human to read a page.
Change what you count
If sessions are your only measure, this era will look like decline regardless of how well things are going.
Worth tracking instead: whether you appear in the overviews for your own key questions, whether direct traffic and branded searches are rising, and whether enquiries mention having seen you somewhere. Those catch value that a session count misses.
The uncomfortable part
Some of that traffic is not coming back, and no amount of optimisation will restore it, because the reader's need was met.
The businesses that adapt fastest are the ones that stop treating a click as the only evidence of being useful.
Common questions
Why has my organic traffic dropped but my rankings stayed the same?
That pattern usually means answers are being shown before the links. Your position is intact, but the question is being resolved without a click, so impressions hold while sessions fall.
How do I tell if AI Overviews caused my traffic drop?
Compare impressions against clicks in Search Console. If impressions are steady or rising while clicks fall, and the affected queries are question-shaped, that is the signature. A genuine ranking problem shows impressions falling too.
What should I do about losing clicks to AI answers?
Shift some effort toward queries that cannot be answered in a paragraph, which for a local business means the ones with commercial intent. Nobody hires a contractor from an overview, so those pages keep their clicks.
Is it still worth writing informational content?
Yes, but for a different reason than before. It builds the credibility that gets you named, and it reaches people earlier. Judging it purely on sessions will undervalue it.