道Dojo · · 3 min read
AI search eats clicks. What small businesses should do now
When Google answers the question itself, hardly anyone clicks on. The numbers are clear. The fix is still not a magic trick but rather boring craftsmanship.
For years, search engines were a deal: you supply content, search supplies visitors. With AI answers right inside search, that deal is being renegotiated, and you are not at the table.
The numbers
In March 2025 the Pew Research Center analysed the search behaviour of 900 adults in the US. When Google showed an AI summary, users clicked a traditional search result in only 8% of visits. Without a summary it was 15%. They clicked a link inside the summary itself in 1% of visits.
Ahrefs reaches a similar picture with a completely different method: across 300,000 keywords studied, the click-through rate for the top result was about 34.5% lower when an AI Overview sat above it.
Meaning: if you lived off answering simple questions well, you are losing visitors. The answer now sits above the link.
The tricks being sold right now
Where there is fear, there is an offer. Packages promising "optimisation for AI search" are popping up: special files for AI crawlers, mysterious markup, copy "written for machines".
Google itself is more sober about it. Its own documentation says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews and no special optimisations necessary. You do not need new machine-readable files, AI text files or special schema markup. A page has to be indexed and eligible to appear in search with a snippet. That is it.
That is no guarantee that tricks never help. But if you pay for a miracle cure the search engine operator itself calls unnecessary, you should at least know what you are buying.
What helps instead
The good news is boring: it is the fundamentals, taken more seriously.
- Be the source, not the summary. AI answers summarise what already exists. What only exists with you, your prices, your experience, real examples, clear facts about your offer, is hard to replace.
- Answer the questions that lead to a job. Not "What is SEO?" but "What does a website for a trade business cost, and how long does it take?". People who ask like that want to talk to someone in the end.
- Look after your Google Business Profile. In local searches people often never reach a website at all. Opening hours, services, photos and replies to reviews make the difference there.
- Clean up the tech. Fast load times, clear structure, every language on its own address. None of this is new, and that is exactly why it is missing surprisingly often.
- Measure what actually happens. Search Console shows which searches you appear for and how often people click. Fewer visitors are not automatically bad if the ones who come get in touch.
The actual goal
Clicks were never the goal; enquiries were. If fewer people land on your site, the site has to do more: say clearly what you do, for whom, and how to reach you. A website that does that will survive the next change in search, too.
