KEY TAKEAWAYS
-
Traffic drop versus ranking drop:
A decline in organic traffic does not necessarily mean your search position has fallen. -
The ladder analogy:
AI Overviews add new content at the top of the search results page, extending the "ladder" above your stable ranking position. -
AI Shortlisting
Potential buyers use AI answers to narrow down their options before visiting websites, shifting top-of-funnel research away from site visits. -
CDN Settings
Ensure security or CDN layers are not inadvertently blocking AI crawlers from indexing your content.
Most boards read a drop in organic traffic as a drop in position. The site was visible, now it’s less visible, so someone has slipped down the rankings. Stephan Marais, head of SEO at Somebody Digital, thinks that reading is the first thing a marketing leader has to correct.
He uses a ladder to explain it. “If you see your brand as a ladder and you are on the first rung, you expect a certain amount of traffic,” he says. “If I, as an executive, see traffic dropping, my understanding is that I am dropping on the rungs of that ladder. But that’s not the truth. In fact, the ladder is growing longer on the top side with AI overviews, and you are staying stable.” The position holds. The page above it is new, and it answers the question before anyone needs to click.
How AI Overviews Affect Search Visibility and Organic Traffic
The mechanic underneath the drop is a change in where research happens. “Potential buyers are arriving at a shortlist of potential retailers before they ever visit your website,” Marais says. The AI does the reading, the weighing and the comparing, and hands back a short answer instead of 10 links to work through. “If you’re not in that answer, you’re not in that shortlist.”
That compresses the middle of the buying process into something that happens entirely outside your properties. Your site still has to close the deal, so the final action still lands with you. The research that used to bring people to your blog, your comparison pages and your resources happens somewhere you can’t see.
So the visits fall. “There’s less search traffic, fewer visits,” Marais says. “But there aren’t fewer buyers.” That distinction is the one you should be landing in a board meeting, because a traffic line on its own invites the wrong conclusion about demand.
Why Organic Traffic Drops Despite Stable Search Rankings
When asked directly whether falling organic traffic is something to worry about, Marais reframes what the number is for. “We shouldn’t be worried about it, but we should be really curious about why that is happening,” he says.
That means splitting branded and non-branded search and look at what’s actually moving. In Somebody Digital’s client data, non-brand search is driving the decline in clicks while branded search grows its share. The queries falling away are top of funnel and informational, the ones that rarely converted in the first place. “Those queries that are declining in search, they were never the ones that were converting anyway.”
One technical thing worth checking this week
Before any of the strategy conversation, there’s a plumbing problem that catches more companies than you’d expect. “In many instances you are probably blocking some of the AI bots inadvertently, through CDNs that have settings in place to block AI bots,” Marais says.
It’s a setting nobody chose, sitting in a layer marketing doesn’t own, keeping a brand out of the answers it’s trying to appear in. Worth checking with whoever manages your CDN before you spend a quarter’s budget on visibility you’re technically refusing.
Search engines are increasingly placing AI Overviews and rich answer features above traditional organic search results. This expands the search results page at the top, leaving your position on the traditional search results ladder unchanged even though it receives fewer clicks.
Not necessarily. The search landscape is shifting how users research products. AI answers provide shortlists and summaries directly in the search results, compressing the research phase. Buyers are still active, but they visit fewer informational links before making a purchasing decision.
Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) or security layers often have default rules or automated settings that block web crawlers used by AI search bots. If these bots are inadvertently blocked, search engines cannot index your content to include it in AI-generated overviews and shortlists.
