Your site appears on the first page of Google, but traffic is stagnating or declining. This phenomenon is affecting more and more sites since search results display answers generated by artificial intelligence. To maintain effective online visibility, the SEO resources to mobilize have changed: it is no longer enough to track your ranking.
Declining organic click-through rate: the real indicator to watch
Have you noticed that Google sometimes answers your question directly, without you needing to click on a link? These boxes, called AI Overviews, intercept the click before the user even visits a site. According to an analysis by Seer Interactive covering several million queries, the organic click-through rate dropped from 1.76% to 0.61% between June 2024 and September 2025 for the affected queries.
The ranking remains stable, but visits are decreasing. This means that your dashboard in Google Search Console may show correct impressions and an honorable average position, while the actual number of clicks collapses. The common mistake is to look only at the position. The trio to cross-reference now: impressions, clicks, and CTR (click-through rate).
Several companies document these analyses and offer guides to adapt their natural referencing strategy to this reality. By browsing the SEO resources from Agence Web Marketing, you can find this type of analysis applied to French-speaking sites, with concrete approaches for each pillar of SEO.
SEO content versus AI results: structuring to remain visible
Why do some pages continue to attract traffic despite AI Overviews? Their content provides value that the generated answer cannot reproduce: a decisive opinion, a numerical comparison, documented feedback. Purely informative and generic pages are the first victims of click interception.
To keep your pages attractive, three areas deserve priority work:
- Answer the main question right from the first lines, then develop an angle that the AI response does not cover (comparative analysis, product limitations, specific use cases).
- Use structured data (schema.org) so that search engines understand the nature of your content: FAQ, reviews, product, article. This does not guarantee rich display, but increases your chances.
- Offer a format that AI does not handle well: comparison tables, infographics, interactive simulators, short videos embedded in the page.
Content that merely rephrases Google’s answer loses its reason for existence. The question to ask before publishing: what does my page offer that is more than the answer displayed directly in the results?
Content quality versus page volume
Producing fifty average articles per month no longer yields the same results as a few years ago. Search engines value more useful, reliable, and distinctive pages. It is better to publish less and delve deeper into each topic than to multiply superficial content.
A simple indicator: if your article offers nothing that a user could not find in thirty seconds on Google, it does not deserve to be published. This logic also applies to product sheets, service pages, and blog articles.
Technical SEO audit: checks that free tools do not perform
Google Search Console and Google Analytics remain foundational. But they do not report everything. Several technical issues go under their radar and harm visibility without triggering an alert.
JavaScript rendering errors are among the most common. If your site loads its main content via JavaScript, Google may index an empty or partial page. A tool like Screaming Frog, in browser rendering mode, allows you to check what the search engine actually sees.
The other blind spot concerns internal linking. Orphan pages (without links pointing to them from the rest of the site) remain invisible to crawlers. A crawl audit reveals these dead ends and allows redistributing the weight of internal links to strategic pages.
What an SEO audit should prioritize
- Loading time measured on mobile, not just on desktop. Core Web Vitals (LCP, FID, CLS) remain signals considered by Google.
- Presence and consistency of title and meta description tags on all indexed pages, checking for duplicates.
- Analysis of the incoming link profile (backlinks) to identify toxic links or recent losses of quality links.
- Verification of actual indexing: compare the number of pages submitted in the sitemap with the number of pages indexed in Search Console.
An audit is only valuable if it leads to a prioritized action plan. Listing two hundred errors without hierarchy amounts to doing nothing.
SEO tracking and AI visibility: adapting measurement tools
Most position tracking tools (SEMrush, Ahrefs, Yooda Insight) measure a site’s position on a given query. What they do not yet systematically measure is the share of clicks actually captured by organic results against AI boxes.
To adapt your tracking, start by segmenting your queries. Identify those where an AI Overview appears. Then compare the CTR of these queries with that of classic queries. This segmentation indicates where to focus your content efforts and where to consider other acquisition channels.
The Pew Research Center documented in July 2025 that AI Overviews reduce clicks to websites, even when the page maintains a good position. A drop in traffic without a decline in ranking is now a warning signal to integrate into your analysis routine.
Natural referencing remains a major acquisition lever, but its management requires more precision than before. Cross-referencing positioning data with actual click metrics, regularly auditing the technical health of the site, and producing distinctive content: these three habits separate the sites that maintain their visibility from those that see it erode without understanding why.
