Since AI Overviews were first rolled out by Google in 2024, they’ve only begun to appear against an ever-larger proportion of search results. According to Ahrefs, that’s had the effect of cutting web traffic to some websites by as much as 58% as users opt to remain within Google’s real estate, rather than clicking through.
Understanding how that is impacting advertisers is difficult, because this change has not been felt equally by every business. Companies that heavily rely on direct-to-consumer sales like jeweler Kendra Scott, or that sell products that customers tend to spend a long time considering, like automakers or white goods, are finding themselves on the sharp end of new search behaviors, for example.
If we zoom out a little, however, clear patterns begin to emerge. At marketing services group Brainlabs, organic web traffic declined on average by over 10% following the introduction of Google’s Overview feature, across a sample of the company’s own Google Analytics data covering 54 clients. The dataset includes 24 U.S. firms, 24 British brands, plus six clients operating in other markets (29 were larger advertisers employing at least 1,000 staff).
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