{"id":181,"date":"2026-08-20T05:04:51","date_gmt":"2026-08-20T05:04:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.akarnik.com\/blog\/seo-traffic-drop-reasons-2026"},"modified":"2026-08-20T05:04:51","modified_gmt":"2026-08-20T05:04:51","slug":"seo-traffic-drop-reasons-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.akarnik.com\/blog\/seo-traffic-drop-reasons-2026","title":{"rendered":"Why Is My SEO Traffic Dropping in 2026?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Written by: Arjun Karnik, Growth Marketing Specialist<\/em><\/p>\n<h2 id=\"key-takeaways\">Key Takeaways: Why Your SEO Traffic Is Dropping in 2026<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>SEO traffic is dropping because buyers now get answers directly from AI Overviews and chat assistants. Impressions rise while clicks fall.<\/li>\n<li>This shift comes from AI Overviews appearing on 48% of queries and 68% of Google searches ending without a click. When AI answers appear, organic CTR drops by roughly half.<\/li>\n<li>Traditional SEO metrics like rankings and clicks no longer show the full picture. Brands now need to track citations, mentions, and share of answer across AI engines.<\/li>\n<li>Winning in 2026 requires accessible content for AI crawlers, buyer-language alignment, structured pages with schema, and frequent updates to stay visible in AI answers.<\/li>\n<li>Ready to diagnose your AI visibility and traffic drop? <a href=\"https:\/\/www.akarnik.com\/demo\" target=\"_blank\">Get a custom AI visibility audit with Arjun Karnik<\/a> that maps fan-out queries and shows where you earn citations instead of just rankings.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>The Problem: Rankings Look Fine While SEO Traffic Slides<\/h2>\n<p>The pattern shows up in Google Search Console as a scissors chart where impressions climb while clicks fall. The two lines drift apart over months, and most founders only notice the half that hurts. This is the zero-click era, and it affects mainstream queries, not edge cases.<\/p>\n<figure style=\"text-align: center\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.akarnik.com\/demo\" target=\"_blank\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/cdn.aigrowthmarketer.co\/1786472460824-bf9470f3f071.png\" alt=\"Line chart showing the scissors pattern over twelve months, with an impressions line rising while a clicks line falls away from it. Illustrative shape of the pattern, not data from a specific account.\" style=\"max-height: 500px\" loading=\"lazy\"><\/a><figcaption><em>Both lines start together. The content keeps getting read so impressions rise, the answer gets delivered on the results page so the click never happens. Most owners see only the falling line.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/searchengineland.com\/google-zero-click-searches-2026-study-479717\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noindex nofollow\">SparkToro&#8217;s 2026 analysis of Similarweb clickstream data found that 68.01% of U.S. Google searches ended without a click in the first four months of 2026<\/a>, up from 60.45% in 2024. <a href=\"https:\/\/omnibound.ai\/blog\/ai-seo-statistics\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noindex nofollow\">BrightEdge data from February 2026 shows Google AI Overviews appeared on approximately 48% of tracked queries<\/a>, up 58% year over year.<\/p>\n<p>The buyer behavior shift is equally stark. <a href=\"https:\/\/prnewswire.com\/news-releases\/new-g2-research-half-of-b2b-software-buyers-now-start-their-research-with-ai-chatbots-302742807.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noindex nofollow\">G2&#8217;s March 2026 survey of 1,076 B2B software buyers found that 71% rely on AI chatbots for software research, and 69% chose a different vendor than initially planned based on AI chatbot guidance<\/a>. <a href=\"https:\/\/prnewswire.com\/news-releases\/new-g2-research-half-of-b2b-software-buyers-now-start-their-research-with-ai-chatbots-302742807.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noindex nofollow\">Thirty-three percent purchased from a vendor they had never previously heard of.<\/a><\/p>\n<figure style=\"text-align: center\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.akarnik.com\/demo\" target=\"_blank\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/cdn.aigrowthmarketer.co\/1786472409902-31baebe3e87f.png\" alt=\"Bar chart showing the share of B2B software buyers who start research with an AI chatbot more often than Google, rising from 29 percent in April 2025 to 51 percent in March 2026. Source: G2, 1,076 B2B software buyers and decision-makers.\" style=\"max-height: 500px\" loading=\"lazy\"><\/a><figcaption><em>In under a year the starting point for B2B software research crossed over. More buyers now begin with a chatbot than with Google.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>The <a href=\"https:\/\/omnibound.ai\/blog\/ai-seo-statistics\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noindex nofollow\">Pew Research Center&#8217;s behavioral study of 68,879 actual Google searches found that users clicked a traditional organic result only 8% of the time when an AI Overview was present, compared to 15% without one<\/a>. That is roughly half the clicks gone on queries where your ranking has not moved.<\/p>\n<figure style=\"text-align: center\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.akarnik.com\/demo\" target=\"_blank\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/cdn.aigrowthmarketer.co\/1786472381682-fffc2026c81f.png\" alt=\"Bar chart comparing click-through rate on a traditional search result, 15 percent with no AI summary shown and 8 percent when an AI summary is shown. Source: Pew Research Center, July 2025, 900 US adults across 68,879 Google searches.\" style=\"max-height: 500px\" loading=\"lazy\"><\/a><figcaption><em>The click roughly halves when an AI summary appears above the result. Pew also found only 1 percent of users clicked a link inside the summary itself.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Appearing in the AI answer is a vendor-selection event, not a vanity metric. <a href=\"https:\/\/prnewswire.com\/news-releases\/new-g2-research-half-of-b2b-software-buyers-now-start-their-research-with-ai-chatbots-302742807.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noindex nofollow\">Eighty-five percent of B2B buyers think more highly of a software vendor when an AI chatbot mentions them in a recommendation.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Ready to see where your business stands in AI answers? Get a custom AI visibility audit that shows exactly which buyer prompts you miss and which competitors capture your citations.<\/p>\n<h2>Diagnostic Checklist: Pinpointing the Cause of Your Traffic Drop<\/h2>\n<p>Now that you see how zero-click behavior reshapes search, the next step is to confirm whether your traffic drop follows this pattern or comes from a different cause. Before changing your content strategy, run this five-point diagnostic. The goal is to separate a sudden drop from a gradual one, and a rankings problem from a clicks problem.<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li><strong>Technical accessibility.<\/strong> Check whether AI crawlers are blocked in your robots.txt. If Googlebot-Extended, GPTBot, or ClaudeBot are disallowed, the retrieval layer cannot read your content regardless of how well it ranks. This remains the most common silent blocker.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Topic coverage.<\/strong> Map the fan-out queries behind your top buyer prompts. A single buyer question triggers dozens of hidden retrieval queries underneath. <a href=\"https:\/\/aigrowthagent.co\/articles\/ai-search-visibility-strategy\/\" target=\"_blank\">Eighty percent of LLM citations do not rank in Google&#8217;s top 100 for the original query<\/a>, which means optimizing for the visible keyword misses the actual retrieval surface that AI engines use.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Buyer-question alignment.<\/strong> Check whether your URLs, H1s, and H2s use buyer language or practitioner jargon. In Arjun&#8217;s test lab, relabeling a jargon-heavy page to buyer language produced citations within weeks of that specific change.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Measurement readiness.<\/strong> Confirm whether you track citations and share of answer across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Gemini. Few marketers currently measure AI visibility and traffic. If your dashboard only shows rankings, it measures a surface the buyer now skips.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Refresh capacity.<\/strong> Identify how many pages in your library have not been updated in the past six months. <a href=\"https:\/\/aigrowthagent.co\/articles\/best-perplexity-ai-seo-tools\/\" target=\"_blank\">The Semrush AI Visibility Study found that AI citations change 40 to 60% month over month.<\/a> In Arjun&#8217;s tests, pages can drop 78% to 99% in two months without updates.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p><strong>Decision tree.<\/strong> If your drop was sudden over days or weeks, check for a technical change first. Look for crawler blocking, a robots.txt edit, a site migration, or a manual action. If the drop is gradual, with months of diverging impressions and clicks, the cause almost always involves zero-click behavior from AI Overviews absorbing informational queries. In one example, impressions rose, average position improved, and clicks still fell. That pattern signaled AI Overviews intercepting top-of-funnel informational pages.<\/p>\n<h2>Why Website Traffic Drops While SEO Rankings Stay Stable<\/h2>\n<p>The core mechanism combines zero-click behavior with fan-out queries. When a buyer types a prompt into ChatGPT or Google AI Mode, the system does not run a single lookup. It triggers dozens of hidden retrieval queries across subtopics and sources, assembles an answer, and delivers it directly in the interface.<\/p>\n<p>The buyer reads the answer where they asked it. If a name in that answer earns their trust, they type it directly into the browser bar. The content did its job and influenced the decision. It just did not leave a clean click trail behind.<\/p>\n<p>The zero-click behavior mentioned earlier translates to only 276 out of every 1,000 Google searches resulting in a click to the open web. <a href=\"https:\/\/omnibound.ai\/blog\/ai-seo-statistics\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noindex nofollow\">Ahrefs analysis of 300,000 keywords found a 58% drop in position-1 organic CTR when an AI Overview is present.<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/omnibound.ai\/blog\/ai-seo-statistics\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noindex nofollow\">Seer Interactive&#8217;s study across 42 organizations showed organic CTR on queries with AI Overviews fell 61% between June 2024 and September 2025.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>The journey now runs in a new order: AI answer, then brand search, then direct visit. The old pattern of query, article click, and CTA happens less often. Judging this channel by clicks alone means grading the work on a step the buyer skipped. Attribution understates the impact. Whatever you measure in analytics represents a floor, not a ceiling.<\/p>\n<figure style=\"text-align: center\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.akarnik.com\/demo\" target=\"_blank\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/cdn.aigrowthmarketer.co\/1786472616931-9a13bc7984c5.png\" alt=\"Bar chart showing 2.5 percent of downstream brand visits after an AI mention carry a trackable referral parameter while 97.5 percent arrive untraceable. Source: Profound, analysis of more than 2 million AI conversations, January to June 2026.\" style=\"max-height: 500px\" loading=\"lazy\"><\/a><figcaption><em>Buyers read an answer, then type your name into a browser. That visit lands as direct or branded search, so whatever you measure here is a floor and never a ceiling.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<h2>Is SEO Dead in 2026 or Just Playing a New Game?<\/h2>\n<p>SEO still matters, but the target moved. More content no longer guarantees better outcomes, and AI discovery cannot be measured like traditional search. Both assumptions break in the current environment.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/aigrowthagent.co\/articles\/best-automated-keyword-research-tool\/\" target=\"_blank\">By 2026, brand visibility in search depends less on page position in ranked results and more on whether a brand is cited within AI-generated responses from systems such as Google AI Overviews and Bing generative search.<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/hzsignal.com\/blog\/ai-overview-citations-top-10\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noindex nofollow\">Roughly 17\u201338% of AI Overview citations come from pages ranking in the organic top 10 in 2026, down from 76% in July 2025.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>The comparison below shows how the game changed and what the new measurement target looks like.<\/p>\n<table>\n<thead>\n<tr>\n<th>Dimension<\/th>\n<th>SEO<\/th>\n<th>GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)<\/th>\n<th>Why It Matters<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n<tbody>\n<tr>\n<td>Optimizes for<\/td>\n<td>Human-ranked lists and domain authority<\/td>\n<td>Machine retrieval and citation<\/td>\n<td><a href=\"https:\/\/techtarget.com\/ai\/feature\/How-Googles-AI-search-could-revamp-business-strategy\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noindex nofollow\">With AI-generated answers, the model selects what information users see<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>Query model<\/td>\n<td>The keyword the buyer typed<\/td>\n<td>Dozens of hidden fan-out queries triggered by one prompt<\/td>\n<td>Most citations come from pages outside the traditional top 100 rankings<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>Primary success metric<\/td>\n<td>Rankings and organic CTR<\/td>\n<td>Citations, mentions, share of answer<\/td>\n<td><a href=\"https:\/\/loudface.co\/blog\/share-of-answer\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noindex nofollow\">B2B SaaS programs with strong AEO architecture achieve 30\u201360% share of answer on targeted prompts, while weak programs sit at 0\u201310% regardless of Google rankings<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>Where authority comes from<\/td>\n<td>Backlinks and domain authority<\/td>\n<td>Expert topical coverage and structured content<\/td>\n<td><a href=\"https:\/\/prnewswire.com\/news-releases\/73-of-b2b-buyers-use-ai-tools-in-purchase-research-multi-source-analysis-finds-302733319.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noindex nofollow\">Brand web mentions show a Spearman correlation of 0.664 with AI citation rates, about three times stronger than the backlink correlation of 0.218<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<tr>\n<td>What sustains a win<\/td>\n<td>Accumulated domain authority<\/td>\n<td>Continuous freshness, with the game resetting weekly<\/td>\n<td><a href=\"https:\/\/aigrowthagent.co\/articles\/best-perplexity-ai-seo-tools\/\" target=\"_blank\">Pages under 30 days old receive 3.2\u00d7 more citations than older content in Perplexity<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<h2>Three Founder Scenarios That Show How to Respond<\/h2>\n<p>Understanding the difference between SEO and GEO helps conceptually, but you still need a practical path that fits your situation. The following three scenarios show how different types of businesses adapt their strategies based on current assets and constraints.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Scenario A: The 0\u20133 marketer firm with a stable content library.<\/strong> Impressions are up, clicks are down, and the SEO retainer keeps reporting that rankings are holding. The diagnosis points to a library consumed by AI Overviews on informational queries while bottom-funnel commercial pages hold steady. The priority sequence is to unblock AI crawlers, add schema to existing pages, and begin tracking citations across ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews before publishing new content. The test is share of answer on 15\u201320 buyer prompts before and after these structural changes.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Scenario B: The SaaS team at an organic plateau.<\/strong> Organic traffic peaked 18 months ago and has been flat or declining despite consistent publishing. The diagnosis shows content structured for rankings instead of retrieval, with fan-out queries unmapped. The priority is to extract fan-out queries directly from ChatGPT for the top five buyer prompts, rewrite slugs, titles, and H1s to match that language, and add a freshness loop. In Arjun&#8217;s test lab, pages rewritten to match extracted fan-out queries earned citations while control pages did not. The test compares citation rate on rewritten pages versus controls after 60 days.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Scenario C: The consultancy with deep expertise but low AI visibility.<\/strong> The firm has a strong referral pipeline and no AI record. Ask an assistant who is good at what they do and their name does not appear. The diagnosis reveals that expertise lives in calls and proposals that the machine cannot read. The priority is to publish structured answers to the exact questions buyers ask, in buyer language, with schema on every page. The test tracks share of answer on category prompts before and after publishing the first pillar cluster.<\/p>\n<h2>Evaluation Framework: Five Levers That Drive AI Visibility<\/h2>\n<p>The five-point diagnostic maps to five core concepts that determine AI visibility. Understanding these concepts helps you evaluate where your content stands and what to fix first.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Fan-out queries<\/strong> are the hidden retrieval queries a single buyer prompt triggers underneath. Optimizing for the visible prompt while ignoring the fan-out means optimizing for the wrong surface.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Topical authority<\/strong> in GEO comes from covering the full question space around a topic, not from backlink accumulation alone. When B2B buyers see a vendor mentioned in an AI response, use-case matching drives the decision, while <a href=\"https:\/\/semrush.com\/blog\/how-ai-shapes-b2b-buying\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noindex nofollow\">only 7% notice it due to brand recognition<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Freshness<\/strong> functions as the entry fee in this channel rather than simple hygiene. <a href=\"https:\/\/aigrowthagent.co\/articles\/best-perplexity-ai-seo-tools\/\" target=\"_blank\">Seer Interactive analyzed 47,097 AI citations across 7,683 pages in ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity between March and June 2026, and found that 75% of cited pages had been updated within the last year, with pages cited consistently across all four months averaging under six months since their last update.<\/a><\/p>\n<figure style=\"text-align: center\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.akarnik.com\/demo\" target=\"_blank\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/cdn.aigrowthmarketer.co\/1786472438102-dfd59b5fabac.png\" alt=\"Bar chart showing 75 percent of pages cited by AI assistants were updated within the last year and 25 percent were older. Source: Seer Interactive, July 2026, 7,683 pages and 47,097 citations across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity.\" style=\"max-height: 500px\" loading=\"lazy\"><\/a><figcaption><em>Three quarters of cited pages were updated inside a year, and the consistently cited ones averaged under six months. The page you refresh beats the page you write.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p><strong>Structured content<\/strong> means using query language in URLs, titles, and H1s, adding schema markup on every page, and formatting answers so the retrieval layer can parse them. <a href=\"https:\/\/searchenginejournal.com\/what-search-engines-trust-now-authority-freshness-first-party-signals\/570553\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noindex nofollow\">A page can rank well in traditional SEO metrics and still fail to appear in AI-generated answers because of an extractability issue rather than a ranking issue.<\/a><\/p>\n<p><strong>Citation monitoring<\/strong> tracks share of answer across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Gemini on a fixed prompt panel. <a href=\"https:\/\/vrid.ai\/blog\/share-of-answer-metric\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noindex nofollow\">A competitive share of citation for B2B brands in 2026 sits between 5% and 15% aggregate across major AI engines, with 20% or above signaling category leadership.<\/a> Each prompt must be run 5\u201310 times per engine because generative models are non-deterministic.<\/p>\n<p>Seeing the scissors in your Search Console and unsure what to do next? We will map your fan-out queries and show you exactly which AI engines cite your competitors but not you, then schedule your visibility audit from there.<\/p>\n<h2>Frequently Asked Questions<\/h2>\n<h3>Why are my impressions going up but my traffic going down?<\/h3>\n<p>Impressions and clicks have decoupled. Google Search Console records an impression every time your page appears in results, including inside AI Overviews that answer the query directly on the results page. When an AI Overview appears, the buyer reads the answer there and often does not click through to your site.<\/p>\n<p>Your content remains visible and helps construct the answer. It simply does not always generate a visit. The fix is not to improve your ranking. The fix is to earn a citation inside the AI Overview itself, which increases organic CTR by 35% compared to brands not cited, according to Seer Interactive&#8217;s research.<\/p>\n<h3>How do I measure whether my business appears in AI answers?<\/h3>\n<p>Start by building a fixed prompt panel of 15\u201325 buyer-intent questions that span category, comparison, and use-case queries. Run each prompt 5\u201310 times across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Gemini, and log three outcomes for each run: whether your brand was mentioned, cited with a linked source, or actively recommended.<\/p>\n<p>Calculate your share of answer as the percentage of total prompt runs where your brand appeared. Track this monthly and compare against two or three named competitors. Also segment AI referrers such as chatgpt.com in your analytics as a distinct traffic class, because this traffic converts at rates significantly higher than standard organic.<\/p>\n<h3>How often does content need to be refreshed to stay cited in AI answers?<\/h3>\n<p>The refresh requirement varies by content type. Product category and comparison pages show measurable citation decay after 60\u201390 days without an update, dropping about 15\u201325% per month until refreshed. Definitional and how-to pages often maintain citation frequency for 6\u201312 months. Trend and news pages decay within 30\u201360 days.<\/p>\n<p>The practical approach is to monitor Google Search Console impression curves and queue an update when a page starts falling, rather than following a fixed calendar. As noted in the diagnostic section, citation decay can be severe and invisible until the position is already gone.<\/p>\n<h3>Does this mean I should stop doing SEO?<\/h3>\n<p>SEO fundamentals still matter. Technical health, structured content, and topical depth support both traditional search and AI retrieval. What changes is the metric you target and the surface you report on.<\/p>\n<p>Content built for citation still performs in Google organic results. On Arjun&#8217;s site, new articles reached thousands of monthly Google impressions within weeks, and the GEO subfolder became the only source of new impressions on the domain in 60 days. The shift is additive. Continue technical SEO hygiene and layer fan-out query mapping, buyer-language alignment, schema markup, and citation monitoring on top.<\/p>\n<h3>Is it too late to start if competitors are already appearing in AI answers?<\/h3>\n<p>Relevance and freshness beat tenure in this channel. A challenger that targets specific fan-out queries, comparison queries, and situational queries can outrun an incumbent with a stale library because the game resets weekly.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/aigrowthagent.co\/articles\/best-perplexity-ai-seo-tools\/\" target=\"_blank\">AI citations change 40 to 60% month over month<\/a> according to Semrush&#8217;s AI Visibility Study, which means no position stays locked forever. Start on the long tail and compound toward head terms. Waiting carries a cost because early citations become tomorrow&#8217;s settled record, and answers gain incumbency over time.<\/p>\n<h2>Next Steps: A Test-and-Learn Checklist You Can Run This Month<\/h2>\n<ol>\n<li>Open Google Search Console and pull the impressions versus clicks chart for the past 12 months. Identify whether the scissors pattern is present and when it started.<\/li>\n<li>Check robots.txt for blocked AI crawlers such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and Googlebot-Extended. Unblock them if present. This remains the most common silent blocker and the first fix.<\/li>\n<li>Add Article schema with datePublished and dateModified to every page. Confirm schema validity using Google&#8217;s Rich Results Test.<\/li>\n<li>Extract fan-out queries for your top five buyer prompts directly from ChatGPT. Rewrite slugs, titles, H1s, and H2s to match that language on your highest-impression pages.<\/li>\n<li>Build a prompt panel of 15\u201320 buyer-intent questions. Run each prompt across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Log your baseline share of answer before making further changes.<\/li>\n<li>Segment chatgpt.com and equivalent AI referrers as a distinct channel group in GA4. Track conversion rate separately from standard organic.<\/li>\n<li>Identify pages that have not been updated in six months or more. Prioritize refresh on pages with declining impressions. A meaningful update adds new statistics, revised recommendations, or extra H2 sections, not a date change alone.<\/li>\n<li>Re-run your prompt panel after 60 days and compare citation rate on rewritten pages versus unchanged controls.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>The window for outsized gains in AI search is open now and resembles the early SEO era. Businesses decoding the answer layer today are building incumbency that will be expensive to displace in 12 months.<\/p>\n<p>If your SEO traffic is dropping and your rankings look fine, the problem sits in your measurement framework, not your positions. Let Arjun&#8217;s team show you what buyers see when they ask AI about your category and which competitors win the answer layer while you still watch rank reports.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>AI Overviews are killing your clicks. Arjun Karnik diagnoses your traffic drop and shows you how to win visibility in AI-driven search. Get an audit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":118,"featured_media":180,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.akarnik.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.akarnik.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.akarnik.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akarnik.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.akarnik.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akarnik.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.akarnik.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akarnik.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.akarnik.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}