How will generative AI affect website rankings and traffic?

Let’s start by taking you back in time.

In 1901, Wilbur Wright told his brother Orville that man would not fly for 50 years.

Two years later, in 1903, the brothers built the first airplane.

The next evolution of search is here now. But we still need to find out when it will be ready to fly.

Now Google has announced that AI Overviews get a higher click-through rate than normal web search results.

We know that Google’s AI listings appear in 15% of queries, but were previously at 84% of all queries.

Generative AI is already influencing website rankings and traffic. And it is here to stay.

But how does generative artificial intelligence affect website traffic?

Let’s review what we know today about how generative AI is impacting website rankings and traffic.

It is important to note that Google and other search engines will likely increase efforts to improve their AI products over time. Also, Google’s AI overviews are only shown to logged in users with incognito turned off in Chrome, so these current impacts may need to be updated.

Organic, direct, referral and affiliate traffic will decrease

So searches will increase, but websites will suffer and generate less organic traffic overall.

Here’s a ballpark estimate:

AI results in 6x searches per day

AI leads to a 60% drop in average CTR

This can lead to a 30% reduction in organic traffic

Every website will feel the pain.

Gilad David Maayan, CEO and founder of Agile SEO, analyzed traffic drops for 23 websites after the launch of Google’s AI Overviews.

In his study, he revealed that after the launch of Google’s AI Overviews, the organic traffic drop was 18-64%.

With Google’s AI overview, it’s a winner-takes-all.

This means that only a few link cards show queries. This could push the small business out of the search results for a larger brand.

These link cards may replace featured snippets, but Google has confirmed that featured snippets aren’t going away – yet!

That shouldn’t be a shock because Google has been testing featured snippets for the past few years.

You may have seen fluctuations in your featured snippet placements over the past few months.

Reduced crawl budget means less content will be indexed

Google has an infrastructure challenge.

The amount of content that Google has to crawl, render, and index is huge, and it’s growing with AI-written content.

Google’s data centers can’t handle it.

So Google results in shortcuts like reducing the crawl budget for sites that have higher content velocity relative to their trust rating.

This means that if you have thin, useless, generic content, Google probably won’t index it at all.

Think about it. Creators ask the same question and leverage AI-generated content in their web content, resulting in massive amounts of spam and duplicate content.

When a search engine detects the similarity of content across all the different websites, it will categorize it as unoriginal.

Today, the best way to get your content seen by Google is through content written with experience and opinion. AI cannot write based on experience.

I use Ziptie to check for AI-written content.

CTRs targeting information queries will continue to decline

CTR for information queries has been declining for years.

Unsurprisingly, this trend has continued, but the rate of decline has been unlike anything I’ve seen before.

Here is an example of the massive drop in information requests.

This site experienced a 71% drop in information query rankings from December 2023 to April 2024.

The affected pages were lists, category pages, glossaries and top-of-funnel educational style.

I target more transactional and navigational content, with Google cannibalizing queries at the top of the funnel.

Searches will increase and so will ranking volatility

Remember in 2016 when Google announced its mobile-first indexing?

It caused an uproar in the SEO community, with people speculating that searches will decline and people will no longer use computers.

In the real world, mobile searches have increased.

It’s a similar situation with AI.

Behavior changes over time. As people learn and adapt to AI, the way people search will change.

The rise of AI will bring about searches increase. And as searches increase, ranking volatility increases.

The top 10 organic search results don’t matter anymore

Google has also experimented with changing the space AI Overviews take up in search results so that it becomes larger and smaller.

I have seen the number one position pushed down by 640 pixels, but it has varied from 200 to 2,000 pixels depending on Google’s experiments.

More ad inventory means lower CPC

Searchers will find Google Ads above the Google AI listing, resulting in an increase in Google’s revenue.

We saw Google’s ad revenue drop nearly 4%. Advertising revenue is Google’s biggest money maker. It’s no shock that Google’s AI listings are intended to benefit ad revenue.

This can result in lower CPC over time.

SEO professionals should continue to work with their PPC counterparts to capture opportunities where you can see drops in organic traffic.

Prepare your sales team for better quality leads, but likely lower volumes of leads

While the traffic flow to your site may decrease, you will start to see higher quality search traffic. As Google notes, “Let Google search for you.”

This means that Google will ask more questions to help provide the best possible search result for that query.

Google’s AI Overviews aim to improve search and make it easy for users to find what they want.

It may take longer for a user to find your site, but if your content is relevant and useful, the searcher who lands on your site is likely to be a higher quality lead.

People will stay on Google more and explore other ways to search

With the rise of ChatGPT, Perplexity and Bing, we will see a shift in growth in other ways people search.

Google’s AI Overviews have also introduced a new way to search. And it is accelerating.

The paradigm shift means that people stay on Google more or explore other search engines.

Make sure you’ve configured cross-network tracking pixels to collect more holistic data sets. And focus on building content clusters to target more in-depth spinoff questions.

Product review sites are at risk

Product reviews were hit hard by Google’s AI listings.

Google generates human-like product recommendations and keeps searchers on Google.

When it generates the product recommendation, Google sends users directly to the store where they can make direct purchases.

This means that product review sites will experience a massive loss in affiliate link traffic.

If you’re a product review site, it’s time to evaluate your strategy. I don’t see this going away anytime soon.

The goal of AI Overviews is to improve the searcher’s experience. Product review websites act as the middleman before they get to the product.

Intent labels must match intent queries to improve content matching

By labeling the intent of your search queries across a variety of datasets (ie “solutions”, “blogs”, etc.), you can begin to train AI to recognize patterns of search queries related to your datasets.

This is learned intent.

Using AI’s learned intent skills helps tailor content to users’ needs, creating a more engaging conversation.

Generative AI affects your website traffic, for better or for worse

Your website traffic and rankings are likely shaken by the advent of AI. There are poorer search results, ranking volatility and education is sparse.

The sad reality is that generative AI is here to stay.

You have to think critically to win. It is no longer about following “best practices”. Keep experimenting, testing and pushing the boundaries to see what works.

Basic information is now seen as a commodity.

Ask yourself: How do you want to develop?