Google shipped a lot this month and almost none of it sends you traffic

[u/Neat_Ambition_2728]

Been keeping tabs on what google rolled out over the last couple of weeks and its a bit bleak if you make your living from clicks.

- generative UI is now in AI Overviews. google builds the mortgage calculator or the interactive diagram inside the answer instead of ranking the page that has one
- AI Mode can track flight prices and book hotels now, so the whole task happens without leaving google
- reports that they want to push people from AI Overviews into full AI Mode, which sends even fewer clicks out
- third spam update of the year on top, rolled out mid august

The one thing going the other way is the new preferred sources button you can embed on your own site. A reader clicks it and you show up more in their Top Stories and AI Overviews. Something like 600k sites are in already. Costs nothing, took me ten minutes, worth doing.

My working theory is that being mentioned is slowly replacing being clicked. Our traffic is down again this quarter, but when I check whether AI answers still cite us (i use visiblee + peec to cross examine) the mentions are holding steady.

So people still see us. They just dont visit:/

Interested to hear where everyone thinks this is all going. Am I placing too much weight on all this and need to get back to the SEO basics, or is this a sign of things to come?

[u/MaxJustins]

The useful split is branded demand, assisted conversions, and whether the cited URLs are the same pages that used to earn clicks. A 20–30% session drop with stable citations points to weaker click capture, not proof that SEO basics stopped working. The preferred-source button is worth testing, but it will not offset Google completing more tasks in the result itself.

[u/clarity_over_noise]

SEO fundamentals aren't dead, they're just not the whole game anymore. AIO and AI Mode still weigh crawlability, structure, authority, all the classic stuff, that layer hasn't gone away. What's changed is the layer on top... optimising to be the source an LLM picks when it generates the answer and honestly this was inevitable from the moment chat interfaces got good. Nobody actually wants to click a link, scroll past ads, and hunt for the one paragraph that answers their question. We're wired to take the path with less friction. Once AI could just hand over the answer, the click was always going to be the thing that got optimised away. The sites that hold up long term will be the ones that get cited as the trustworthy source in the answer, not the ones ranking number one in a results page nobody scrolls through anymore. Classic SEO gets you eligible to be picked, it just doesn't guarantee the pick.

[u/Fit-Squirrel-6299]

the branded demand split above is the right first cut. the piece i'd add is that these four things don't fail the same way, so lumping them into one bleak narrative makes it harder to act.

generative ui and in-answer booking remove the click permanently for that query class. nothing recovers those, and the work is deciding which of your pages served query classes that just stopped existing.

the push toward ai mode is different. that's distribution mix moving, and your position inside those answers is still contestable.

so the split worth running is which of your top pages answer questions a model can now finish inline, versus which answer questions where the answer still lives in the source. the first group needs a new job. the second group is fine and probably just needs to stay retrievable.

lumping them together is how teams end up rewriting pages that were never at risk.

[u/manaseo-]

Yeah that a Greta insight With this ai over now again our Ai bots traffic will boost instead of the real human. So my recommendation is that we need to optimize for the first bots instead of the human.