AI answers took your traffic. What to do about it

AI overviews and chat assistants now answer a large share of the questions that used to produce a click. This is not reversible. What matters is which pages still earn a visit and how to be the source that gets cited.

What is lost

Definitional and general how-to content. "What is a CMS", "how to write a brief", anything a model can answer from general knowledge. If your traffic was built on that, it is going and no technical fix returns it.

What still earns a click

• Transactional intent. Someone ready to buy or hire wants a page, a price and a person.
• Local intent. An answer cannot replace a business with an address and reviews.
• Original data. Your prices, your results, your survey. A model can cite it but cannot generate it.
• Anything requiring trust in a named author. Legal, medical, financial, and specialist professional advice.
• Tools and calculators. Interactive things cannot be summarised away.

How to be cited

Assistants quote sources that are clear, specific and structured. In practice: answer the question in the first paragraph rather than after five hundred words of preamble; use headings that match real questions; include concrete numbers and dates; keep facts current; mark up what you can with schema. Content that is easy to extract cleanly is content that gets attributed.

Do not chase the ranking, chase the outcome

Page views are a weakening proxy. Count enquiries, mentions in enquiries, and sales cycles shortened because a question was answered before the call. A page that produces two clients a year is worth more than one producing two thousand visits.

The thing that has become more valuable, not less

Being known. Direct traffic, referrals, a name people search for. When an assistant sits between the search and the site, the businesses that suffer least are the ones people ask for by name. That is brand work, and it now has an unusually direct commercial justification.