If you have searched for anything on Google in the last year, you have seen it. An AI-written summary sits at the top of the page and answers the question before you reach a single link. For the person searching, that is often fine. For the business whose website supplied the answer, it changes the maths.
What the numbers say
The clearest data comes from the Pew Research Center, which tracked the browsing of 900 adults in the United States through March 2025. About 18% of the 68,879 Google searches in the study produced an AI summary. When one appeared, people clicked an ordinary search result on 8% of visits. When none appeared, they clicked on 15%. They clicked a link inside the summary itself on 1% of visits. (Pew Research Center, 22 July 2025)
Ahrefs, which sells search software and so has an interest in the subject, measured click-through across 300,000 keywords. Comparing December 2025 with December 2023, they found an AI Overview cut the click-through rate of the top-ranking page by 58%. An earlier version of the study, published in April 2025 and comparing March 2024 with March 2025, put the drop at 34.5%. (Ahrefs, 4 February 2026)
Both studies are American. I have not found equivalent figures for New Zealand, but I would not assume we are far behind.
What Google says you need to do
Very little that is new. Google’s guidance for site owners says a page has to be indexed and eligible to appear with a snippet, and that “there are no additional technical requirements”. It says you do not need special files, extra markup or any particular structured data to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. (Google Search Central, updated 10 December 2025)
Keep that in mind the next time someone offers to optimise your site for AI search for a monthly fee. The ordinary basics still decide whether your pages are eligible at all, and nobody can sell you a shortcut past them.
Where the effort goes now
Fewer clicks does not have to mean fewer customers. It does change what the website is for.
Be the page the answer is built from. A summary needs something specific to summarise, and copy about quality service and a passionate team gives it nothing. The things people actually search for are the things worth writing down plainly: where you work, how you price, how long a job takes, what happens first, and what it costs to get started. They are also the facts a summary can cite.
Write for the person who clicks anyway. By the time someone reaches your site they have usually read the summary already. They want the detail it left out and an obvious next step, whether that is a phone number, a form or a price list. If that is buried three menus deep, the click is wasted.
Count enquiries rather than visits. Search Console includes clicks from AI features inside its ordinary web results, so you cannot separate them out. If traffic drifts down while calls and form enquiries hold steady, nothing is broken. If enquiries fall too, that is worth a conversation.
Keep the plumbing sound. A page that is slow, blocked from indexing or broken on a phone cannot be a source for anything. That work is unglamorous and it has not changed.
Nobody knows where this settles, including the companies building it. What I would avoid is paying for a new kind of optimisation before the old basics are done properly.
