We’ve all heard it. The constant, jarring racket of alarmist articles screaming doom and gloom over cratering click-through rates (CTRs). You’ve probably been told to start measuring your share of voice (SOV) – anything to grok actionable data before the big bad AI can sink your carefully constructed website and SEO efforts like an LLM torpedo.
Consider what Seer Interactive said after doing their study about AI overview (AIO)’s impact on CTR in Google:
This is no longer optional. Your teams have lost 40-65% of their ability to drive clicks year-over-year, regardless of how well they execute. If you’re still measuring success primarily by traffic and clicks, you’re setting your teams up to fail and miss the real wins they’re achieving. Keep sight of new KPIs: share of voice in AI citations, branded search lift, and assisted conversions.
In fairness, the study does eventually caution readers against interpreting their results too broadly, but by then the damage has been done. You’re worried about watching helplessly as a huge percentage of your clicks are eaten by the gaping maw of artificial intelligence, and you don’t know which KPIs are still worth the digital paper they’re printed on. What should you do?
Relax, Captain. There are clear skies ahead.
Traffic Patterns and User Intent
Here’s the thing: if your product is a professional service, you don’t really need the 40-65% of clicks you’re losing to AIOs, anyway. We’ve repeatedly found that a law firm with a modern digital marketing strategy and a well-maintained website can absolutely hemorrhage aggregate CTR while maintaining or even growing conversions at the same time – which means your intake team will spend less time triaging bad leads and more time talking to potential clients.
Built properly, your website won’t just endure the turbulence of AIOs – it will thrive on it.
An increase in clickless searches related to your keywords can even equate to a net positive for your business. Think of AIOs as menacing scarecrows, shooing away the ravenous birds who only wanted to visit your site to devour its information for free. This concentrates the users actually reaching your website to the people actively trying to engage with your transactional pages, and isn’t that what we’re all hoping for in the first place?
A Modern Mindset for Your Data Sets
Aggregate traffic isn’t great at measuring success right now. While AIOs are having an undeniable impact on the flow of traffic derived from your informational pages, local, transactional, and commercial searches are seeing far less impact.
That’s a good thing. For the vast majority of businesses out there, informational pages were never the product – they were the bait. New data suggest we’re heading toward a disconnect between sources of information and sources of products/services. If so, that’s a win for…well, pretty near everyone.
Consider the example below, which illustrates the new reality that can divorce clicks from impressions:
The CTR barely registers here, clocking in at a paltry 0.2%, and impressions have fallen significantly. And yet, total clicks maintain their usual trajectory. Let’s see how this entity’s organic keywords fared over the same period of time:
We see a bit of growth followed by a downturn that mirrors the drop in overall impressions we saw above. Noting the relative lack of volatility on that bottom line, which represents the top keywords, we can see that what’s being lost are weaker, tangentially related keywords that only existed in the first place to amplify the authority of the site’s real money pages. Those money pages are still holding strong. That’s where the clicks that actually matter always came from, and still do, so we’re good to go.
Trending Toward New Horizons
Unless information is your product (looking at you, Google), what you’re seeing here is an opportunity to significantly diversify your digital marketing budget beyond the realm of informational pages.
I want you to imagine a world where we can create content that focuses on the transaction itself–what you’re buying, how to use it, why you’d want it–instead of content that pretends to teach you about a topic you already understand only to do a hard pivot into some sales pitch at the end.
It’s a beautiful dream, right? And the best part is we’re on our way.
Aaron Fennell is the Director of Client Success at We Do Web. He has been exploring how digital marketing can be done better, faster, and cheaper for more than 15 years. On weekends, Aaron can be found experimenting with new designs for his tabletop game company or trotting around a soccer field as a seasoned referee.
