Google built the modern web on a simple contract: websites provide good content, Google indexes it, Google sends users to those websites. That contract is breaking down.

Google AI Mode, rolled out broadly in May 2026, answers a growing proportion of search queries directly on the results page. The user asks. Google answers. The user does not click. The website that provided the answer does not get the visit.

What the Numbers Show

Research published after the AI Overviews expansion put the click-through rate drop for queries where an AI Overview appears at around 34% compared to the same queries without one. Position one gets hit the same as position five because the user already has the answer before they reach the links. The ranking did not change. The traffic did.

AI Overviews now appear on roughly one in five searches in South Africa. That number is rising. The queries they appear on skew toward information: definitions, how-to questions, comparisons, explanations. If your site's traffic strategy relies on those query types, the ceiling on what good rankings can deliver has moved.

The Uncomfortable Part

Google did not generate those AI answers from nothing. It trained on content published by websites across the internet. When AI Overviews answer a question about your industry, they are frequently summarising something written by someone in that industry. The writer does not get the visit. The answer appears on Google's page.

This is not a conspiracy. It is a business model shift. Google's product is providing answers, and it has become better at providing them without an intermediate step. The practical question is what to do about it.

Which Queries Still Send Traffic

Not all search intent is equal. AI Overviews struggle with queries that are local, commercial, or require a specific provider. "What is SEO" has an AI answer. "SEO agency Johannesburg" does not produce a satisfying summary — the user needs to contact someone, and Google cannot do that for them.

Transactional queries, where someone is ready to buy or hire, still send clicks. Branded searches, where someone types your business name specifically, are protected. Complex queries requiring multi-page reading or hands-on expertise still send traffic because the AI answer is demonstrably incomplete.

What to Actually Do

The content that stopped working is generic informational content. The content that still works is specific, first-hand, and transactional. Shift your publishing toward case studies, process breakdowns, pricing guides, and service comparisons — the content a buyer reads, not the content a browser reads.

The second move is GEO: optimising to be the source Google's AI cites, rather than optimising to rank below the AI answer. Clean structured data, direct Q&A formatting, and factual specificity make content citable. If your content appears inside an AI Overview, you get brand exposure without the click. That has value too, especially for building awareness among buyers who are not yet ready to contact anyone.

The contract between Google and the web has changed. The businesses that adapt their content to the new terms keep their visibility. The ones waiting for 2023 to come back will keep watching their traffic slide from a ranking position that has not moved.