Business

Google's AI Answers Are Eating the Click. Be the Source Instead

Google's AI answers are sending fewer people to websites. Here's a plain checklist for becoming the source those answers quote, and for building traffic you own.

Alejandro Diaz · 2026-10-30 · 6 min read

AI Search SEO Marketing Small Business

Two pieces of news landed on the same day this week, and together they explain a lot about where search is heading.

On Thursday, October 29, Alphabet shares fell 12.6%, wiping out about $500 billion in market value, according to NBC News. Part of the reason: a senior Google executive told investors that search ad revenue was underperforming partly because AI Mode shows fewer ads. The same evening, Reddit's CEO Steve Huffman told analysts that in October, search traffic from Google had dropped by more than 1 million referrals per week on average. His summary of Google's AI Mode was blunt: "The reality is the AI mode does not drive traffic."

If Google itself is earning less from these answers, and one of the most-linked sites on the internet is losing clicks, it's fair to ask what that means for a brokerage, a clinic, or a ten-person software company. I've spent my career helping people explain what they sell in plain words. That skill just got more valuable, because the first reader of your website is increasingly a machine that summarizes you for someone else.

What actually changed

Classic search gave people a list of links. They picked one, landed on your page, and you had a shot at earning their trust.

AI Overviews and AI Mode give people an answer first. The links are still there, but fewer people need them. This isn't new this week. In 2025, Pew Research tracked the browsing of 900 U.S. adults and found that when Google showed an AI summary, people clicked a regular result in 8% of visits. Without a summary, they clicked in 15%. Links inside the summary itself got clicked in about 1% of visits.

So the click is shrinking. What isn't shrinking is the question. People still want to know who does what they need, where, and for how much. Someone is going to be quoted in that answer. It might as well be you.

Ranking tenth matters less than being quoted

Here's the shift in one sentence: search is becoming answers, and the useful goal is to be the source the answer is built from.

I'll be honest about the limits. Nobody outside Google knows exactly how AI Mode picks its sources, and anyone who claims a guaranteed formula is selling something. Classic SEO basics still matter too. Fast pages, clear titles, sensible links and good content didn't stop counting.

But some things are plainly helpful to any system trying to understand your business, human or machine:

That last one surprised us when we looked at our own site.

What we changed on our own site

In October we rebuilt aethercraft.io with this exact problem in mind. Our case studies looked great in a browser, but the raw HTML a crawler received had only about 100 words in it. After the rebuild, those same pages serve 900 to 2,700 words of real text before any JavaScript runs.

We also added structured data to every page, so search engines get a clean description of who we are, what each page is, and who wrote it. We published an llms.txt file that lists every article and definition on the site, a simple map for AI tools. And we wrote a glossary of 19 terms in plain language, like what AI-powered software actually means, because definitions are exactly the kind of thing AI answers love to quote.

I'm not going to claim results we can't show yet. It's been weeks, not months. But none of this work was wasted even if AI search vanished tomorrow. Clearer pages help human visitors too.

A checklist you can work through this month

You don't need a rebuild to start. Most of this is writing, not code.

  1. Rewrite your top five pages to answer four questions in the first two lines: what you do, for whom, where, and a rough price range. If you can't share prices, say what drives them.
  2. Publish two real case studies. The problem, what you did, and one or two numbers you'd be comfortable defending on a phone call.
  3. Check what crawlers see. Open a page, choose "View Page Source," and search for a sentence from your main copy. If it isn't there, your content depends on JavaScript, and it's worth asking your developer about server rendering or prerendering.
  4. Add structured data for your organization, your services, your articles and your FAQs. Google's free Rich Results Test will tell you if it's valid.
  5. Create an llms.txt file at the root of your site listing your most important pages with one-line descriptions. It's small, cheap and harmless.
  6. Start a definitions and FAQ library in your own words. Answer the questions customers actually ask you on calls. One clear page per question beats one giant page nobody finishes.
  7. Track the right numbers. Branded searches (people searching your name), direct traffic, and inquiries that mention where they heard of you. Rankings alone will tell you less every quarter.

Build the channels nobody can turn off

Reddit is a useful warning here. Its revenue grew 53% last quarter and it still lost a large stream of visitors because a partner changed how its product works. If that can happen to a company of that size, a small business shouldn't bet everything on one source of traffic either.

The fix is old-fashioned and it works:

When search shifts again, and it will, these channels keep the phone ringing while you adjust.

Where to start

If you only do one thing this week, open your homepage and read the first two lines as if you were a stranger, or a machine. Does it say what you do, for whom, where, and roughly what it costs? If not, that's your starting point, and it costs nothing but an afternoon.

If the crawler check in step 3 turns up a mostly empty page, or you want help turning your services into pages that answer real questions, that's work we do every day. You can see what we build, read why we build around the workflow rather than the model, or just book a short conversation below. We'll tell you honestly what's worth doing and what isn't.

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