Google AI Overviews are causing fewer clicks for some site owners. If this is a fundamental shift in the web's traffic economy, how can site owners control where their content appears?

Arcjet

Google's AI Overviews are reducing website traffic as search results increasingly provide direct answers instead of linking out. Public companies report traffic declines from 52% to 28%, though Google claims overall click volume remains stable. Unlike OpenAI's granular bot controls, Google offers limited options for site owners to control how their content is used in AI features. Site owners can only block all Google crawling or allow everything, creating a dilemma as the traditional web traffic contract may be breaking down.

How long until we need to block Google?

<p>That’s a really good question, it’s a “content robbery”, which can be useful to let be scraper by ChatGPT or equivalent  to be mentionned and a kind of “marketing channel” but with Google there’s almost no value, just loosing traffic</p>


<p>I won’t lie that Google searches drive me batty with the AI results, which is why I keep AI results turned off, yet they still break through. And the SEO issues it causes for website traffic is insanity.</p>
