Is SEO dead because of AI Overviews? No. But the way you report on it needs a serious update, and honestly, so does the conversation you’re having with your leadership team about it.
TL;DR: If your traffic dropped and you’re not sure whether to blame AI Overviews, your SEO strategy, or a shrinking market, don’t guess. Build a site specific click through rate curve, check your rankings and share of voice before you touch the traffic number, confirm whether search demand actually declined, track AI Overview impressions as a brand signal, and run a quick audit of how LLMs describe your brand. Bring all of it into one meeting instead of one anxious “traffic is down” email.
This post is based on an Ahrefs live session featuring Lidia Infante. Full credit for the frameworks, methodology, and data walkthrough goes to Ahrefs and Lidia Infante. You can watch the full session here: Traffic is down, AI Overviews are up: What do you tell the C-Suite?
FAIR WARNING: this video is super technical…you might just want to read the summary below. :roll:
I missed the live version of this webinar. It aired at 4am my time here in Texas, and even this coffee loving early bird has limits! So I watched the replay instead. Lidia Infante, an SEO leader and marketing strategist with 10 years of experience in organic growth, currently at Ahrefs and previously at SurveyMonkey. It was worth staying up late for the recording, so I’m breaking it down here.
Webinar summary:
The Story Executives Are Hearing Isn’t the Full Picture
Revenue is down for a lot of companies lately, growth has slowed, and it’s easy for “SEO is dead” to become the explanation of choice, especially when that story is circulating on LinkedIn. Infante pushed back on this framing hard. Search volume hasn’t collapsed across the board. What’s changed is where clicks go once someone searches.
AI Overviews took a slow, gradual erosion in organic click through rate and turned it into a sharp one. As AI Overviews and AI Mode keep expanding into more queries, the pressure on organic traffic keeps building. That’s a real structural shift, but it’s a different problem than “nobody is searching anymore,” and it calls for a different response.
Step 1: Build an AIO vs. Non-AIO Click Through Rate (CTR) Curve
Rather than accepting a generic industry statistic about AI Overview impact, Infante walked through building a site specific click through rate curve using Ahrefs Site Explorer and Google Search Console data. The process, in broad strokes:
- Pull your organic keywords from Ahrefs, filtered to positions 1 through 10 (anything beyond that is mostly noise for this purpose)
- Normalize keyword formatting so your Ahrefs and GSC exports actually match up
- Flag each keyword as AIO or non-AIO based on Ahrefs’ search features data, and flag branded vs. non-branded separately, since brand recognition affects click behavior independently of AI Overviews
- Bring in your GSC clicks and impressions, then calculate CTR by position for each bucket
- Apply a leverage check so no single keyword is skewing your curve, generally keeping any one keyword’s influence under roughly 30 percent
The result is a curve that shows, in your own data, how much value a top ranking position has lost once an AI Overview appears. In the example used during the session, position one lost about 13 percent of its expected clicks once an AI Overview showed up for that query. Infante noted she’s seen swings as steep as 82 percent on other sites, so the impact varies widely by industry and query type.
Step 2: Check Rankings and Share of Voice Before Traffic
Before traffic became unreliable as a single KPI, position was the leading predictor of it. Infante’s recommendation is straightforward: check whether your rankings and keyword coverage have actually declined before concluding that your SEO program has stopped working. If positions are stable or improving, that’s evidence the strategy is sound and the rules around what traffic converts to have simply changed.
She also pointed to share of voice as an underused metric worth bringing into the boardroom. Unlike traffic, share of voice isn’t affected by whether an AI Overview shows up or not, since it measures your visibility relative to competitors across a set of tracked keywords. It’s a clean way to set targets and rally a team around taking market share back from competitors, and it holds up well when a CFO asks for a single number that represents SEO performance.
Step 3: Confirm Whether Search Demand Actually Dropped
Sometimes search volume for a given topic genuinely is declining, and it’s worth checking rather than assuming. Infante suggested pulling tracked keywords into Ahrefs Keywords Explorer to calculate a search volume growth rate by topic or product line over time. In her own case study using Typeform style keyword sets, tool related searches dropped in volume year over year, while use case and “how to” searches around the same topic actually increased. That kind of nuance changes where you invest content effort, and it’s a much stronger answer to “people aren’t searching anymore” than a blanket yes or no.
Step 4: Use AI Overview and AI Mode Impressions as a Brand Signal
Even when an AI Overview doesn’t send a click, it can still be doing work for your brand. Infante recommended tracking AI Overview impressions (available through tools like Ahrefs Brand Radar) and AI Mode impressions in Google Search Console as indirect evidence that demand is intact. Her observation: a jump in AI Overview impressions is often followed by an increase in branded search a few weeks later, which suggests people are learning about a brand through the AI Overview and then coming back to search for it by name.
Step 5: Run a Quick LLM Visibility Audit
To walk into a stakeholder meeting ready for questions about how the brand shows up in AI tools, Infante suggested a simple exercise: ask each LLM platform you care about the same six questions, repeated five times each, and look for consistent patterns. Questions should cover who your brand is, what makes it unique, what your best product is, and how it compares to competitors. Running the same questions against competitors adds a useful comparative angle for leadership conversations.
She also recommended log file analysis (Ahrefs offers a free bot analytics tool in beta) to see how often LLM crawlers are actually retrieving your content, separate from whether they’re sending traffic.
Meeting with the Boss
What to bring to the meeting: one slide covering the CTR curve, ranking trends, and share of voice, a second slide covering search volume trends and AI impression data as a rebuttal to the “nobody searches anymore” narrative, and notes from the quick LLM audit.
The goal isn’t to dismiss the impact AI Overviews are having. It’s to replace a vague, anxious conversation with a specific, data backed one that shows leadership exactly what changed and what to do next.