AI Overviews and what they did to clicks

What actually changed

AI Overviews answer the question on the results page. When one appears, a meaningful share of people who would have clicked through no longer need to, and measured zero-click rates have risen substantially over the last two years.

The effect is not evenly distributed. It falls hardest on general explainer content, the sort of article that answers a question in three paragraphs, because that is exactly what an overview can reproduce.

Local commercial search is far less affected

Overviews appear on a much smaller proportion of local searches. When somebody searches for a service near them, Google still answers with a map, businesses, reviews and phone numbers, because that is what the searcher wants and an overview cannot replace it.

For a Perth service business, that is the strategically important fact. The searches that produce your enquiries are the most defensible part of the current landscape.

What we changed as a result

We stopped recommending general informational content as a traffic strategy. A guide explaining what a meta description is has almost no path to an enquiry now, and it never had a strong one.

What still works is content with a commercial edge: what something costs, how to choose a supplier, why a specific thing went wrong. Those searches are made by people with a budget and a problem, and an overview summarising the answer often increases rather than removes the need to talk to somebody.