Your search traffic is down. Rankings have not moved, nothing broke, and the pages that used to bring people in are still sitting where they always did.
What changed is above them. Google now answers a great many questions directly on the results page, and a person whose question has been answered has no particular reason to click anything.
What is actually happening
Search used to be a directory. You asked, it listed places that might know, you chose one. The click was the product.
Increasingly it is an answering machine. It reads the pages, synthesises a response, and presents that response first. Your content may well be part of the answer. The visit is not.
The pattern this creates is specific rather than general. Informational queries lose the most, because those are exactly the questions a summary can settle. Queries where someone is deciding, comparing or ready to spend money hold up far better, because a paragraph does not resolve them.
Check whether this is your problem
Open Search Console and compare the last few months against the same period a year earlier. Look at impressions and clicks separately, because the relationship between them is the whole diagnosis.
- Impressions steady, clicks down. You are still being shown, people are not coming. That is this problem.
- Impressions down too. Something else is going on. Ranking loss, a technical issue, or seasonality.
- Both up but enquiries down. Not a search problem at all. That is the site failing to convert the people who do arrive.
Then look at which pages lost most. If it is your explainer content while your service and pricing pages are steady, that is the shape of it, and it is worth knowing before you conclude your SEO has failed.
What still gets clicked
A summary is good at settled facts. It is bad at several things, and those things are where attention is now worth spending.
- Anything local. “Near me” and county-level searches still send people to businesses, because the answer is a specific supplier rather than an explanation.
- Anything with money attached. When someone is close to spending, they want to see who they would be dealing with. A summary does not satisfy that.
- Genuine experience. What actually happened on a real job, with specifics a model could not synthesise from the general web.
- Anything requiring judgement. “Which of these two, for a business like mine” is a question a general answer handles badly.
The common thread is that summaries are excellent at what is generally true and useless at what is specifically true for one reader.
What to actually do
Stop competing on definitions. Publishing an explanation of a widely understood concept was already a crowded strategy. Now it competes with an answer printed above it for free.
Write from the specific. A page about how a decision went for a business in your sector, with the constraints and the trade-off, is not summarisable, because the value is the particularity.
Take the local ground seriously. For an Irish business this is the most reliable traffic left. A properly maintained business profile, real reviews, and pages that name where you actually work.
Reduce dependence on search entirely. This is the uncomfortable one and the most important. A business whose enquiries come only from Google has one supplier for its customers, and that supplier changes its terms without notice. A list you own is the standard answer, which is one reason the newsletter question has become more serious than it used to be.
On being included in the answer
There is a growing industry offering to optimise your content for AI answers. Treat it with the same caution as any other guaranteed-ranking offer.
What can be said without inventing anything: content that is clearly structured, directly answers the question it raises, and is technically accessible to crawlers tends to be used. That is not a new discipline. It is the same technical foundation that has always mattered, and no plugin sells it to you.
It is also worth being clear-eyed that being cited is not the same as being visited, and a strategy whose goal is inclusion in someone else’s answer is not a strategy for getting customers.
The honest summary
Traffic to informational content is under pressure and that is unlikely to reverse. Traffic from people close to a decision is holding up.
The practical response is not to write more, it is to write less of what a summary handles better, and more of what only you can say. And to make sure Google is not the only way anyone can reach you.
If traffic has dropped and you cannot tell whether this is the cause or something has genuinely broken, describe what the numbers are doing. The two look similar from the dashboard and have entirely different answers.
Common questions
Why has my traffic dropped when my rankings have not moved?
Because the answer now appears above the results. Check impressions and clicks separately: steady impressions with falling clicks is this problem, and falling impressions is something else entirely.
What content still gets clicked?
Anything local, anything with money attached, genuine experience, and anything requiring judgement about a specific situation. Summaries are excellent at what is generally true and useless at what is true for one reader.
Should we pay someone to optimise for AI answers?
Treat that with the caution you would give any guaranteed-ranking offer. Clear structure and technical accessibility help, and that is the same foundation that has always mattered. Being cited is also not the same as being visited.