This video shows how to see whether you’ve had traffic drops for certain search queries using Search Console data. Then you can test whether Google AI Overviews have stolen this traffic. Or read on for the steps in full.
Lots of you are seeing drops in organic Google traffic since AI Overviews arrived, and it’s difficult to get performance data on this.
Here I’ll show you how to see which Google search queries have lead to a drop in organic traffic to your website. Then you can test whether Google AI overviews are the culprit.
You need at least 15 months worth of data in your Search Console account to get the insights.
Use Search Console data to diagnose your traffic drop
1. Go to your Search Console account and navigate to the Performance report.
2. Select the Compare option.
3. In the time comparison screen, choose ‘Compare 3 months year over year’.
You’ll see your search queries listed, with those that generate the highest click volumes at the top. Don’t use the overall difference in clicks to diagnose the AIO traffic drop – drops could be due many reasons like 2024 offerings and events which are now closed, and changes in audience demand.
4. Click on the ‘Clicks difference’ column twice – this will show you search queries which have experienced the biggest drop.
5. Search for the queries where clicks have dropped in Google, to see whether an AIO appears in results.
My website hasn’t experienced a significant drop in Google traffic as a result of AIOs, but for this demo let’s pretend that I’d had a significant drop for the query ‘digital performance dashboard’.
An AIO appears for this search. An Ahrefs study showed that the presence of an AI Overview in search results correlated to a 34.5% lower average click-through rate for the top-ranking page compared to keywords without an Overview. So AIOs are likely to be contributing to traffic drops.
It’s important to check this while we still have search data for before and after AIOs were introduced. Search Console only retains 16 months worth of data, so get in quick.
You’ll most likely see a drop in traffic informational content – guidance, blog posts, how-to guides. For large informational sites this could be a large portion of your traffic.
What do I do about a drop in traffic?
This will depend on your goals, your users and the platforms you publish on. We need a more nuanced approach to our search strategy than just ‘Get more traffic to the website’, which we might have had in the past, and we need to respond to our audience, using data.
- Be clear about your goals
- Understand your audience with data
- Create a content discovery strategy to meet those goals and customer needs
- Test and experiment!
What other AI performance data can I get?
- We can’t see accurate data for website mentions or links in AI responses. Paid SEO tools can provide an indication but the value vs cost equation doesn’t add up for most organisations.
- We can’t see the exact volume of clicks to our website from Google AI overviews, but this filter for GA4 from Dana Di Tomaso gives us a good indication.
- We can see traffic referred to us from other AI engines by creating a custom filter in GA4 and updating it when new engines appear.