Organic Traffic Might Be Down, Are You Taking Action to Adapt to the Effect of AIOs?

Have you noticed a drop in organic search traffic to your website from Google?

You’re not alone. AI Overviews (AIOS) are increasingly present in search results. If you’re familiar with SEO, this should not be news. And if you’re not, be aware: AIOs might be impacting your site's traffic and brand awareness. These AI-generated summaries provide quick answers on the search page, pushing regular results down and reducing clicks.

In Canada, Google deployed AIOs in October 2024, and their usage has surged since early 2025. If you haven’t encountered an AIO yet, you will soon.

Navigating the AIO shift: surprising traffic trends and brand opportunities

Digital marketing professionals have noted reduced impressions and clicks on organic listings. Those featured as primary sources in AIOs see some benefits, though clicks remain low as users get instant answers.

Studies conducted in the US highlight keyword types triggering AIOs, effects on brand awareness, and revenue impact. This is where things get interesting because this might start giving us an idea of how we can adapt and take advantage of the opportunity while still driving growth.

Many industries are seeing some impact, and many websites are observing changes to the amount of traffic they are getting directly from organic results in Google.

Some hard data: The impact we’ve seen in Canada

Since late 2024, we’ve been analysing how AIOs affect our partners’ websites. By 2025, we’re making significant progress. While optimal solutions are still in development, there are tools to track and measure visibility within AIOs and their impact on overall traffic.
We’ve manually calculated what AIOs mean for our clients. Our results generally align with others, but there are mixed findings. Here are some examples.

Some of our partners - leaders in their fields with strong brand visibility, content strategies, and authoritative websites - maintain or improve regular organic rankings. However, clicks are down 25% to 70% in some cases. AIO presence has increased, especially for top and mid-funnel queries.

There's a mix in impressions - most websites are seeing a decline, but one saw an increase due to branded queries capturing AIOs with their website as the main source.
Despite fewer clicks, these websites are capturing more AIOs (boosting brand visibility) and registering stable or increased sales/conversions.

In one major category, we are seeing about a 50% drop in branded query clicks when AIOs are triggered. Impressions are also down 35% in average for the same queries where AIOs are triggered. The trade-off is that the brands are rapidly growing in the number of times they are sources within the AIOs where 25%+ of the time the brand is the primary source for the AIOs.

It should be noted that AIOs primarily affect upper and middle funnel searches when users are in the educational phase. Lower funnel searched see far lower AIOs. As a result, we have not seen a corresponding decline in conversions which makes sense as they are still completing actions on the website – they just no longer need to click through to sites to get answers to educational questions.

Why it matters

AIOs offer comprehensive responses but reduce clicks, creating a zero-click environment that can boost brand visibility. Brands that are already well-positioned and have strong content have the opportunity to increase their authority by getting featured as sources in AIOS. There is an indication that Google favours top-ranking sites.

AIOs are on the rise in Canada, so there’s no turning back. Companies must adapt their content strategy to increase their chances of being featured on AIOs. Finding the gaps and focusing on answering the questions that the users have brings the opportunity to increase trust and authority for your websites and brand. If you are not aware of how prominent your website’s presence in AIOs is, on how this is affecting traffic, brand visibility, and ultimately conversions, you should start looking into as soon as possible.

Acting fast also allows you to assess your overall holistic search strategy, ensuring your spend on paid search can be optimized. Organic and paid search need to work together to maximize your search visibility and increase revenue in the long term. AIOS might also include ads in the near future, which might allow you to enhance visibility for your brand, but if you are not already there organically as an authoritative source, you might already be missing momentum.

AIOs – along with new search platforms including Perplexity, ChatGPT & Claude – are all examples of how AI is dramatically changing the search landscape. A new industry term is GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) which is optimising content to appear in AI-generated search results and responses. But any industry expert knows that existing SEO best-practices already address GEO. But we do believe all of these new AI-driven tools and platforms will further increase the importance of SEO and make SEO even more important and the highest ROI strategy of a marketer’s budget.

Jorge Loria Ancona is VP of search (SEO) at Saatchi & Saatchi Canada.