The Traffic Decline Isn't (Only) About AI.
Everyone is blaming AI Overviews right now.
It makes sense on the surface. Traffic drops. AI launches. People connect the dots. But that story is incomplete, and if you're building your strategy around it, you're solving only part of the problem.
The decline in organic search traffic started years ago. We were just too comfortable to notice.
The years we got away with it
Google kept sending traffic. Not because the fundamentals were strong, but because the shift was slow enough to ignore.
Then COVID hit. Every website that had a remotely relevant audience saw a surge. Lockdowns, stimulus money, bored people with laptops. It looked like growth. It wasn't. It was a mask.
When the pandemic tailwind disappeared, the underlying trend showed up. And it looked like a cliff.
Where the traffic actually went
People didn't stop searching. They changed where they search.
And that started years ago.
Amazon became the default starting point for product discovery. Not Google. If someone wants running shoes, they go straight to Amazon. If they want a couch, same thing. Google lost the top of the e-commerce funnel years ago, quietly and permanently.
Social media took over discovery. TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. People find brands, products, and ideas there now. They don't type a query into Google to discover something new. They scroll.
E-commerce businesses read the room. They went all in on Meta Ads. Not because Google failed them overnight, but because the math had been shifting for a long time and Meta was where the buyers were.
What we're living through now
This is a market correction.
Not a catastrophe. Not an AI apocalypse. A correction that was clearly foreseeable if you were watching where consumer behavior was actually going.
Some thought leaders like Rand Fishkin from SparkToro (no affiliation) have seen this coming years ago, while many of us kept pushing for Google traffic.
The businesses that are panicking right now built everything on a channel that was already showing cracks. The AI Overviews narrative is convenient certainly true as >50% drops in Click-Through-Rate for a #1 ranking hit hard. However, the structural shift towards discovery on other platforms was already done.
When ChatGPT came out, about a month or two later, I started to see the shift happening: Random forums, blog posts, etc. suddenly were the source of what ChatGPT would say about a brand. I created PlatformLeverage back then and started helping clients prepare for a multi-platform strategy. Today we help clients with our main brand, SEOLeverage, in the context of Search Everywhere Optimization, to get in front of decision-makers where it matters!
Understanding the real cause matters because it changes what you do next. You don't fight a market correction by yelling at Google. You adapt to where discovery actually happens.
That part is worth thinking about carefully.