AI Overview is Killing My Site. Or Is It?

Lately folks are worried about how AI 0verview is killing traffic and I want to address it from the perspective of being a top source in my niche.

AI is here to stay. There is absolutely zero chance this genie goes back in the bottle. I don't like to make absolute statements but I'll stand unflinchingly on this one.

This means we will see increasing AI involvement in every aspect of marketing, search results and online business in general.

You can fight it, or you can embrace it.

Search as we know it is becoming irrelevant. What matters now is writing content that AI interpreters find helpful. This goes beyond "hitting keywords" and into actual contextual awareness and nuance.

I don't mean to be alarmist, but I genuinely believe businesses who eschew AI are going to be left behind.

This doesn't mean AI takes over everything you do, or that you use AI to write all your content, but that if you ostrich your way through this time in history you might look up to see that the world has moved on without you.

Since AI Overviews, My Traffic Is Going Down

(hold on, I'm caught in a song incidentally titled Days in Avalon and it hits me so right.)

Okay. shaking that off

I want to speak to this concern. I was just looking at analytics for my farm blog. I built this blog in 2010. I blogged casually off and on over that time, never worrying about SEO, never worrying about writing what I thought the Google god wanted, just writing real, grounded, actionable and thoughtful posts.

I think I had about 75 posts over more than a decade before really knuckling down for 2026. This point matters because some of you think quantity is better than quality and I'm here to loudly say no no, that's not the way!

Referrals from this little blog accounted for 20% of my total sales on my ecom for 2025 so it's a powerhouse of high quality traffic, arguably one of the most valuable properties I own on that fact alone.

I recently began posting weekly. I have a backlog of content to add and want to really start providing value. Once again, I'm writing what I want to write. I do no keyword research.

Yet. Check out that growth.

In a world where AI overviews are "destroying traffic." I think the opposite is true. It's a pretty great honor to be considered worthy of those top spots. It means Google algos and its AI have vetted the information and concluded it is worthy.

Imagine you're an average search engine user looking for reliable information in a world rife with stupid spammy keyword-stuffed posts that don't actually help, and you see this glowing recommendation as the most trustworthy answer:

And ask yourself why your traffic would drop if you're really providing the best in class information you can?

The burden going forward is to ensure that the content we create is truly valuable, helpful to the user, and complete.

Which is what we should've been doing all along.