FROM THE BLOG

It’s time to face a truth many website owners are resisting: The game of organic traffic is not broken — it’s been remade. If your blog, e-commerce site or WordPress page is losing clicks despite holding strong rankings, you’re witnessing the dawn of the Google Search Generative Experience (SGE) era — and your old SEO playbook needs a radical re-write.

For years, we believed that if you ranked in the top three on Google, you were golden. Clicks followed rankings. Today? Not so much. Google’s new generative AI overview box — powered by the Gemini model — is increasingly delivering answers in the search results themselves. Users get what they need, and never bother clicking through.

So when you see your position stable or rising, but your traffic plunging, don’t chalk it up to “something wrong with your content” alone. It’s a recalibration of the system. Your content may still rank, yet a machine?summary might be siphoning the click you were expecting.

Let me be blunt: the control you once had — over click-through, brand visibility, the scroll real estate — is slipping. Consider these realities:

• The AI overview often appears above the fold (especially on mobile) and commands attention before organic links. Traditional listings get pushed down.

• Your site may be contributing to the AI summary, yet you don’t get the benefit of the click. You’ve become a source, not the destination.

• Generic, templated content that once passed muster now gets filtered out. The AI systems favour rich, entity-aware, structurally sound pages.

• On mobile — where most traffic lives — the effect is amplified. Users may never scroll past the AI snippet.

In short: ranking still matters, but visibility and then clicks no longer automatically follow. The domain of competition has shifted.

Of course, some winners are emerging, and their playbook offers clues:

•Government and educational sites (.gov, .edu) with high authority and structured content are often pulled into those summaries.

•Blogs or platforms that consistently use entity-rich content (brand names, tools, frameworks), well-structured headings, and in-depth knowledge appear more often.

•Forums and user-generated content (UGC) — which offers conversational, authentic user voice — are surprisingly showing up in AI summaries more than cleaned-up marketing blurbs.

If you’re producing decent content and still losing traffic, you’re not unlucky — you’re playing the old rules in the new arena.

I’m convinced there’s one core principle guiding this shift: Write for humans. Format for machines. Everything old about SEO still matters — relevance, authority, links — but you must add the layer that makes content machine-readable, machine-summarisable, and machine-trusted. That’s the new frontier.

Here’s what I believe are essential steps:

1 Answer first, explain later. Give the core answer in the first 1-2 sentences, then expand. AI systems and voice search engines prefer this.

2 Structure like a pro. Use question-based headings (“What is…?”, “How do I…?”), bullet lists, short paragraphs, bold TL;DR sections. Be scannable.

3 Entity-rich writing. Mention explicit tools, brands, frameworks, people — signal to the machine exactly what you’re talking about.

4 Schema markup matters. FAQPage, HowTo, Product – these help your content become understood by search engines and AI.

5 Don’t drop the human tone. Yes, format for machines; but still write for people. The machine helps you get seen. The human keeps you trusted.

6 Audit your content for “AI-readiness.” Are you ranking yet losing clicks? That’s a red flag. Use tools (e.g., a site-audit checklist) to gauge your content’s structure.

7 Don’t fear the change — anticipate it. SEO isn’t dead. Far from it. It’s just evolving. The winners will be those who learn to serve both humans and machines.

If you feel like your content game is good, your SEO intact, yet traffic still bleeding — welcome to the new normal. Rather than lament traffic drop after traffic drop, let’s view it as the next stage of search.

The shift to AI? Dominant summaries by Google is a dramatic disruption, but one you can adapt to. The question is simple:

Will you keep doing SEO the old way — or will you evolve it?

Great content still wins. But in 2025, “great content” isn’t just helpful or high-quality. It’s helpful, high-quality and machine-friendly.

Time to upgrade your approach.