The Google AI Update CRUSHING Your Business Right Now
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by all the changes happening online. If you’re a business owner or marketer, you’re not alone in wondering why your website traffic is falling off a cliff.
Last week, I spoke with a friend who runs a successful online shop. She used to rely on Google search to bring in new leads and customers. But lately, she’s watched her numbers drop—fast. She tried everything the SEO experts recommended, but nothing worked. She felt lost and frustrated, just like so many others.
You don’t have to just watch your business slip away. This article will show you real strategies that are working right now—so you can adapt, grow, and stay ahead of the curve.
By the end, you’ll know exactly what’s changed, why it matters, and how to take back control.
In today’s video essay / article you’ll learn how to:
- Unlock the real reason search traffic is vanishing — Understand the hidden forces behind the drop and what’s really happening on Google.
- Tap into new channels for growth — Learn how smart brands are using social media, newsletters, and more to win back lost customers.
- Turn every piece of content into a powerful sales tool — See how to make every post, article, or video work harder for your business using the “Every Post Rule”...
Let's dive in...
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Shocking Traffic Drops Revealed
Google's ongoing AI updates are crushing businesses right now, and SEO marketing gurus are lying to you about it. While they're painting a cozy, rosy picture that everything's fine, the data says different.
The image below shows how SEOs are feeling about Google these days. According to a recent survey, nearly 68% of SEO professionals say they now like Google less, while only 6.5% say they like it more.
This growing dissatisfaction highlights just how deeply the recent updates have shaken the digital marketing world.
Take HubSpot, a $24 billion SaaS giant. They went from 16 million monthly visitors to less than three million. Forbes? Similar story. My own company, Growbo, saw search traffic plummet by more than 85%.
These aren’t isolated incidents. This is an extinction-level event for tens of thousands of businesses. If you’re noticing your website traffic drop, you’re not alone—and it’s not just a blip.
Three AI Changes Explained
Three major changes from Google’s AI are at the heart of the problem:
- AI Overviews are now showing at the top of search results, summarizing answers so users don’t need to click through to your site. SEMrush found that the percentage of keywords with AI overviews jumped from 6.5% to 20% in just a few months. When these overviews appear, click-through rates drop by 70%.
- Google’s War on Content Farms is sweeping up legitimate businesses, too. Even high-quality, well-maintained articles are losing rankings overnight because Google suspects AI involvement in content creation.
- Zero-Click Searches are rising fast. In March 2024, 24% of searches resulted in zero clicks. A year later, it’s 27%, and for news sites, it’s pushing 70% on mobile devices.
We wrote hundreds of high-quality articles with all the E-E-A-T you could have, but we saw.E-E-A-T standing for expertise, experience, authority, trust.
PPC Costs Are Soaring
Maybe you’re thinking, “I’ll just shift my SEO budget to pay-per-click.” So is everyone else. That’s why costs are skyrocketing:
- Real estate CPC: up 35.5%
- Retail: up 20%
- Personal injury attorneys: up nearly 600% since 2021
The following image presents current data on PPC advertising expenses. It shows that the average annual cost of leveraging PPC ads now falls between $108,000 and $120,000, reflecting the growing financial burden businesses face as ad competition intensifies.
Meta ad costs are rising by 50% to 200% in just 30 days. Small and medium businesses are getting priced out of the market.
If your business relies on organic search, the old rules no longer apply. Waiting for things to "return to normal" is a recipe for disaster. The genie is out of the bottle.
Chegg: A Stark Warning
Chegg was a $12 billion company built on the assumption that students would always Google for homework help. Then ChatGPT arrived. Within three years, Chegg’s market cap dropped by 98.7%, from $12 billion to $160 million. Their massive content library became worthless overnight.
“Who wants to go and peruse through a database of content when you could just get an instant answer completely custom-tailored to you just by typing into a chatbot”
The chart below shows just how quickly ChatGPT’s user base exploded, reaching nearly 200 million monthly active users by May 2023.
This meteoric rise explains the sudden and dramatic shift in user behavior — students no longer needed to search for answers when AI could deliver them instantly. That same pattern is now rippling across every content-driven industry.
If it can happen to Chegg, it can happen to you.
Fashion, travel, DIY, cooking, and other content-heavy industries are seeing 65-70% drops in search traffic. Even big names like Forbes and Newsweek aren’t immune.
Zero-Click Search Is Rising
Google wants to keep users in its ecosystem. For news, zero-click searches are up to 70% on mobile.
For all searches, it's steadily rising. The chart that follows visualizes this trend clearly:
- 65% of Google searches end without a single click
- 33.6% go to organic results
- 1.6% go to paid ads
In other words, the majority of searchers now get their answers directly on Google—never leaving the results page. This shift has massive implications for websites relying on organic traffic and ad revenue.
ChatGPT, Google’s main AI competitor, has 9% market share and a higher click-through rate, but 64% of clicks go to just 120 domains. The playing field isn’t getting any fairer.
Prepare for a 10x Worse Future
What seems inevitable at the moment is that zero clicks will continue to rise. They're predicted to crack probably 70% for news by the end of 2025, and they'll probably exceed 30% in the near future overall as well.
Furthermore, full AI mode is going to continue rolling out. Google is looking to keep users within its ecosystem once again because that's how it's ultimately going to compete with ChatGPT, and then sell ads on top of it or some sort of premium subscription as well.
The Gradual Shift
The way that they are going about it though is pretty smart overall. They're not really changing the search experience.
They're bringing the benefits of AI into search, but over time they are going to gradually—and have already started to—move users into using full AI mode.
Just the other day when something updated on my phone, I used my thumb to actually tap where I normally tap to search for something. My thumb inadvertently hit a new icon for AI search mode and AI search mode popped up.
Now, I can guarantee you that the positioning of that icon is intentional, so probably the same thing is happening to many millions of users all over the world.
Because again it's about a gradual move - it's like the slow boil: you put the frog in the pot and you warm up the water and it slow boils and it doesn't even realize it's being boiled to death until it's too late.
Finding Your Opportunity Gap
There are still gaps you can exploit:
- Commercial and transactional keywords: AI overviews only appear about 10% of the time for these. Optimize landing pages for bottom-of-funnel keywords—they're less likely to be replaced by AI summaries.
Why? Because Google wants to give users the best experience, and users don't necessarily want information summarized for them if they're looking to buy something.
They're looking to transact, so they need to actually go to a business or business's website.
- E-commerce is particularly safe: With only a 4% show rate for AI overviews, e-commerce remains one of the most protected categories.
Real estate, apparel, dining, sports, and fitness are also considered safer zones to still get some organic search traffic because AI overviews just aren't showing as much for those either.
- Tutorials and visual content: AI isn't good at generating these yet. If your content delivers unique diagrams, visuals, or step-by-step videos, people are still incentivized to click through.
For example, with content that has a lot of diagrams—like when explaining funnels in various blog posts—people are incentivized to click through to actually get the benefit of seeing those diagrams in context so that it all makes sense and it's actually more of a visual teaching as a result.
What’s Working Right Now
Platform-diversified brands are winning. If you’re dependent on Google, you’re vulnerable. Omnichannel is the way forward.
We neglected social media for years, thinking organic search would always be there. That was a mistake. Social media—especially organic campaigns—now presents a huge opportunity.
The next chart highlights why social media remains one of the most effective marketing channels today. According to Statista,
- 86% of marketers say social media increases brand exposure
- 76% report higher traffic
- 64% credit it with generating leads
Beyond awareness, more than half say it helps build loyal fans and improve sales—making it an essential pillar of a diversified marketing strategy.
“TikTok helped small and medium businesses generate $14.7 billion in revenue in 2024.”
Posting weekly 30-60 second videos triples engagement. Social commerce is growing at 23% year-over-year, now generating $7 billion globally.
If you’re new to social media, remember: awareness is the top of the funnel. You need people to know you exist before they can buy.
Case Studies: Real Success Stories
Newsweek lost a huge chunk of Google traffic. Their solution? Expand their Reddit strategy: three staffers posting on 10 subreddits, 10 times a day.
Result: Reddit traffic grew from 200,000 to up to 4 million page views per month.
Healthy Holistic Living lost 90% of their traffic after Google’s helpful content update. They built new Facebook pages in multiple niches, reused old SEO content in viral formats, and used tools to boost engagement.
Some pages grew to 40,000 followers in weeks, driving millions of impressions.
The New York Times focused on growing newsletters and YouTube output. Newsletters became a meaningful share of their overall traffic, helping offset SEO declines.
Growbo’s Hard-Learned Lessons
After we saw a huge loss over the last two years—building up 500 plus high-quality articles ranking well for terms like sales funnels, only to see traffic decline over 85%—we had to adjust. So we went social. We've gone omnichannel: YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, and many other channels.
Our Two-Part Strategy:
- Messages to the Edges Strategy
Go where the customers are—YouTube, LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram. We take a video, repurpose it into an article for our email list and blog, then cut it up into social media posts, clips, and reels.
The result: we turn one piece of content and syndicate it across eight plus different channels.
We're not assuming people will find us through Google anymore. Instead, we adapt the format and style for each platform and syndicate out the core content, whether it be quotes or short clips.
Think of each post like a mini landing page with a single conversion goal—to make a sale, get an email opt-in, whatever it might be.
Your goal with social media posts is you don't just want to convert the human. You want to be converting the algorithm. The algorithm essentially is the audience. The algorithm decides as the gatekeeper whether to show your content or not.
Low-Hanging Fruit: LinkedIn Premium
Sign up for LinkedIn Premium if you're promoting on LinkedIn. It's about 60 bucks a month, probably some of the best money you'll ever spend. It gives you a boost in visibility and the option to put a call to action at the top of every LinkedIn post—a link to your website or newsletter. It's similar on YouTube where you can have a call to action in video descriptions.
Conclusion: Take Action Now
Speaking of the every post rule and driving more conversions—if your traffic has been cut in half, you can fix that by increasing your conversion rate. That's where our free sales funnel checklist can help you.
It can help you analyze how your funnel is currently constructed and what pieces might be missing so that you can adapt to this change and still continue to grow as zero clicks accelerate and AI search overviews become more prevalent.
If you found this valuable, subscribe to the channel, give it a thumbs up, and share it with one person who might also find it valuable.
But I encourage you to diversify now. Start going omnichannel. What are the top two to three platforms where your customers are?
Leave me a comment. Let me know how this is affecting you. Where is your business at? How's your traffic doing? I'd love to hear from you.
The reality is that businesses that are going to thrive are the ones who adapt strategically but also overreact. You have to believe the sky is falling because this is a fundamental shift in how business is done and how businesses are found online for the foreseeable future.
If you're waiting for 2022 to return, your business might die while you wait—because it's not going back to the way it was. The genie is out of the bottle.
Keep Growing, Stay Focused,
Image Credits:
1. https://www.digitalinformationworld.com/2024/03/googles-popularity-among-seo-experts.html
2. https://ddiy.co/ppc-statistics/
3. https://www.businessofapps.com/data/chatgpt-statistics/
4. https://searchengineland.com/zero-click-google-searches-rose-to-nearly-65-in-2020-347115
5. https://www.hostinger.com/tutorials/digital-marketing-statistics
