AI Overviews: Time to Sound the Alarm About Website Traffic?

Published by Nate Chambers on May 18, 2026

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Written by Chloe Becker

Online search is changing. What’s more—it seems that we are at the starting point of those changes rather than being anywhere near the endpoint. Some years from now, it is highly possible, if not probable, that the process of surfing the net—as we called it in the 90s—will be conducted entirely within an AI application like Gemini or ChatGPT, with AI agents performing tasks on our behalf, perhaps autonomously when we aren’t in front of the computer screen.

But for now, the clearest evidence of change in the process of “discovery” in our online activity is found in AI overviews. These are the text boxes that appear at the top of many search results, particularly when the search query is posed as a question.

You can try it yourself to see what we mean. Google the question “how to bake a vegan cake?” and the top result will be an AI overview with guidelines and a recipe for a vegan cake.

Organic website clicks are plummeting

You clearly don’t need to be an SEO expert to gather that such a result could impact website traffic. If you had googled that same question say three years ago, your intent would be to find a vegan baking website. You would have likely visited the website, which may have earned revenue from your visit, through advertising or a subscription.

Now, you may skip the AI overview and still visit the website, but you’ll probably appreciate that not everyone will. Some studies have put the drop in organic clicks at around 38 percent. Smaller websites can be hit harder.

Of course, as you might expect, it depends on the type of platform. Generally speaking, when you search for information – facts and figures, recipes, history, trending topics – you are more likely to get nudged to an AI overview. If you are searching for things that require “doing,” which could range from buying new sneakers to searching for online casino games, you are less likely to see the AI overview because the endpoint is to do something, not retrieve information.

An incentive to create must be found

Nevertheless, you can see that there could be a problem. The internet still works on incentives. People launch websites and blogs because they either want to showcase their passions or be financially rewarded.

If nobody is visiting your vegan baking website because information is being published in AI overviews, then you are losing the incentive to do it. This is a real problem, and it is not being discussed or acknowledged with the severity it deserves.

To explain, let’s consider this: AI does not “know” how to bake a vegan cake. It has found this information to create the AI overview in the same places a human would – on those very websites that are losing human traffic.

But if logic dictates that people will be less inclined to create new content when traffic is dwindling, it also dictates that AI will be able to find less new and original content to formulate its answers. It is, for all intents and purposes, a vicious circle, leading to a less vibrant web. It leans into what we call “dead internet theory.”

So what is the solution? Well, there are basically two ways to go. People could start blocking AI web crawlers en masse, which would make AI overviews less useful and potentially obsolete.

The second is a system whereby creators are rewarded when AI uses the information from their websites. A so-called “pay-per-crawl” financial system has already been established by the internet gatekeeping company Cloudflare, though it remains to be seen how successful such a model will be.

Yet, whatever happens, we do need to treat this issue with the concern that it deserves. Website traffic is being hurt in the new era of the internet, and as we have explained, it could disincentivize human creators to share their stories, wisdom and know-how. A solution must be found to change the trajectory, lest the internet become a less interesting place.