My website traffic dropped after Google AI Overviews started. What do I do this week?

Four things to do this week, in this order

You don't need a new strategy tonight. You need four small moves, done in order.

1. Look before you fix. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI. Ask each one the questions your best customers ask, in their words. Write down who gets named. This is the AI Visibility Snapshot. It takes about four minutes.
2. Check the door. Type yoursite.com/robots.txt into your browser. If you see a line that names GPTBot, ClaudeBot or another AI bot next to "Disallow," your site is turning them away. The free AI crawler checker can show you this too.
3. Find your best answer. Pick the one question your customers ask most. Find the paragraph on your site that answers it.
4. Move the answer to the front. Make the first sentence the answer, plain, with a number if you have one. Put the "it depends" in the next sentence.

That is it for this week. Each step is small. Together they move you from "the AI can't use me" toward "the AI can name me."

First, check that it really is AI Overviews

A drop that lines up with AI Overviews is not always caused by them. A Google update, a broken page or a seasonal dip can look the same on a graph. So take ten minutes in Google Search Console before you change anything.

Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode are counted in the Performance report, under the "Web" search type, together with normal results (Google Search Central). There is no separate AI report. So compare two date ranges, before and after the drop, and look at three lines.

Do this page by page for your most important pages.

What Google itself says about AI Overviews

Google's own guide for site owners is short and worth knowing. Three points from it, checked on 2026-10-21:

• No special steps. Google says there are no extra requirements and no special optimizations needed to appear in AI Overviews. It also says you do not need new AI text files or special schema markup. The same basics as normal search apply.
• You can limit what it shows. If you don't want parts of a page shown, Google points to the nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet and noindex controls. Be careful: these also limit how you look in normal results.
• Clicks may be worth more. Google says people who click through from results with AI Overviews tend to spend more time on the site. That is Google's own observation, not an outside study, but it fits the shift: fewer clicks, from people further along.

The source for all three is Google Search Central.

The click did not vanish. It moved into the answer.

Here is what happened to your traffic, in plain numbers. Pew Research Center studied what people do when Google shows an AI summary. They click a normal link about 8% of the time. Without a summary, it is 15%. They click a link inside the summary only about 1% of the time (Pew Research Center).

So the list of ten blue links is shrinking into a short answer. And a short answer has room for about three names.

That is the real loss. Not only clicks. The chance to be chosen at all.

Monday morning, and the graph points down

You open your stats over coffee. The line that used to climb is sagging. You check the dates twice. It started around the time those AI answers began showing up at the top of Google.

Your first thought is that you broke something. Your second is to do more of the old thing. More posts. More keywords.

Don't. The old moves were built for a list. You are now competing for a spot in an answer, and the rules are different. When Ahrefs looked at Google's AI Overview citations, the share that came from top-ten pages fell from about 76% to about 38% (Ahrefs). Ranking well is no longer the same as being quoted.

Two things to stop doing right now

Stop stuffing keywords into your paragraphs. A sentence like "affordable freelancer bookkeeping services small business bookkeeper" names the topic and answers nothing. An AI building an answer needs a real claim it can repeat.

And stop hunting for a secret file. You will be told llms.txt is the fix. Google's own engineers have said they don't use it. It gives you the feeling of action with none of the real work.

The real work is duller. Make your pages readable. Say what you are. Write the answer first. I know that is less exciting. It is also the part your rivals skip, which is why it works.

A month-long plan for the traffic you lost

This is the problem Found by AI was written for. It starts where your graph started: the moment the list became an answer.

The Introduction: The New Front Door explains the shift with the Pew numbers and gives you the Snapshot, so you see which check you fail before you spend a weekend on the wrong one.

Chapter 4, Can I Quote You Cleanly?, is the step 4 above done properly. It gives you a four-line Citability Checklist and shows the same answer before and after, so you can see a buried sentence turn into one an AI lifts word for word.

The Conclusion: The 30-Day Visibility Build paces the whole fix across a month, a few days per check, so a one-person business can do it between real work.

The free Found by AI workbook has every tool as a printable page. If you want the bigger question answered first, read is SEO dead because of AI.