Two kinds of conversation have been landing with us this year. Some businesses arrive having watched Search Console tell them the same story for months - impressions holding up, clicks drifting down, and nothing wrong with the rankings to explain it. Others arrive from the opposite direction: they already run Google Ads with us, they've noticed assistants answering their buyers' questions, and they want to be in those answers before their competitors are.
Both end up in the same place, which is why it's worth separating two things that usually get argued as one. Some traffic genuinely has gone, and rather more is still winnable than the average LinkedIn post about this suggests.
The traffic that isn't coming back
Someone searched for a quick fact, got it in the Overview and closed the tab. That visit is gone, and no amount of optimisation retrieves it.
It lands hardest on one type of content: the high-volume informational post that existed to catch a definition query and funnel some percentage of readers somewhere more useful. Whole content programmes were built on that mechanic. A fair few of them no longer work, and the sensible response is to stop resourcing them rather than to keep publishing more of the same.
Citations are the contested ground now
The answer has to come from somewhere. Overviews cite sources and so do assistants, and those slots are being claimed while a lot of businesses are still deciding whether any of this is a fad.
Being the cited source is worth two fairly different things. There are the clicks that still happen, from people whose question wasn't fully resolved and who want to see where it came from - fewer than before, though usually further along than an average organic visit. And there's presence inside the answer itself, where your name sits next to the recommendation whether or not anybody clicks.
The second is harder to value and probably matters more. It's the same mechanism as being the company ChatGPT names when a buyer asks who to shortlist, where one answer draws on a few sources and everyone else is left out of it.
The work that earns the slot is ordinary enough: crawlable, well-structured pages, consistent entity signals so the systems can tell what you are, content that makes clear claims and answers questions directly enough to be lifted without mangling, and third-party corroboration backing up what you say about yourself. Most of that overlaps with SEO and with the structured data work we've been doing for years, which is why we run it as one programme rather than sell it as a separate product. None of it guarantees placement.
Measurement has to widen
If clicks are a narrowing window onto your visibility, measuring clicks alone will show you a decline that's part real and part artefact of the format, without distinguishing between them.
So we run structured prompt testing across the major assistants, to see whether you come up for your buyers' actual questions and how you get described when you do. Where you don't come up, the useful part is who gets named instead. Any single run of that is noise, so it gets tracked over time.
We also separate AI referral traffic out in analytics and watch what it does after it lands. The volumes are usually small enough that people wave them away, though the behaviour is usually better than average.
And where we have Search Console access, we read it for the new pattern rather than the old one. Impressions holding steady while clicks thin out is what a format change looks like, and if you read it as a ranking problem you end up fixing things that were never broken.
This is early-days measurement, and I'd rather hand over limited numbers with the caveats attached than a confident dashboard implying more precision than actually exists.
What this changes in the reporting
Reporting built purely on sessions will keep showing a decline it can't explain. Adding citation presence to the monthly report is a small change that makes the rest of the numbers readable again.
Most clients aren't doing it yet. Starting now mostly buys you a baseline, which isn't much to look at on its own, but you can't show a trend without one.
