The signature to look for
Open Search Console and put impressions and clicks on the same chart. An impression means your link was shown. A click means somebody actually came.
If impressions held steady or rose while clicks fell, the answer is almost certainly the answer box. You are still being shown. People are getting what they needed without leaving the results page.
If impressions fell too, this is not an AI Overviews story. That is a ranking or an indexing problem and it has ordinary causes worth ruling out first.
Which pages take the hit
The loss is not spread evenly. It lands almost entirely on pages that answered a question somebody could finish reading in one sentence.
- Hit hardest: definitions, conversions, opening hours, quick how-to steps, anything with a single correct answer. There was never a reason to click, only a lack of alternative.
- Barely touched: pages somebody has to use rather than read. Product pages, pricing, tools, booking, anything where the point is doing something.
- Mixed: comparisons and buying guides, where the box summarizes the shape of the decision and the reader still comes for the detail.
What is worth doing about it
The traffic that left was informational and it is not coming back by rewriting the same page harder. Three things do help.
- Be the source the box quotes. If the answer is going to be given without you, the next best thing is that it is given from you and names you as the sourceCitationA citation is a link or source name AI search shows next to its answer to indicate where a piece of information came from.. That means the direct answer sits in the first paragraph, in one liftable sentence.
- Move effort to pages that survive. A page nobody can finish in a summary keeps its traffic. Tools, calculators, real data, anything interactive.
- Change what you are counting. Clicks on informational pages are now a worse measure of reach than they were, because reach is happening in a place that produces no click at all.
The uncomfortable part
Some of that traffic was never worth what it looked like. A page bringing in visitors who wanted one fact and left was reporting reach, not demand. Losing it hurts a chart more than it hurts a business.
What matters now is whether you are named when somebody asks which business to use, which is a different question from how many people landed on your definition page. You can check that directly by asking AI search your buying questions several times each and counting. That is mention rateMention rateMention rate is the share of answers that named your business, out of all the times a question was asked., and it is the number that replaced the one you lost.
The long version
What is GEO, and how do you actually do it covers all of this from the beginning, including the parts this page skipped.