Last Friday, Nick Fox, Google’s head of search, took to LinkedIn with a message clearly aimed at nervous publishers and website owners. His claim: Google’s AI features, meaning AI Overviews and AI Mode, now send billions of clicks to websites every single week. Liz Reid, VP of Search, reshared it with a warm note about AI “expanding curiosity” and helping people connect with the creators and publishers they love.

Lovely sentiment. Now let me tell you what they did not say.

Read the statement again, carefully

Fox did not say Google sends more clicks than it did before AI Overviews arrived. He did not say your traffic will recover. He said Google still sends billions of clicks. Those are very different claims, and the wording was chosen with care.

Google handles somewhere in the region of five trillion searches a year. At that scale, “billions of clicks weekly” is not a boast. It is simply what happens when even a shrinking percentage of an enormous number leaves the building. A leaky bucket still pours water if you keep filling it fast enough.

What the independent data shows

Whilst Google talks in comforting absolutes, the third-party research talks in percentages, and the percentages are grim:

A recent zero-click study found Google now sends only around 27.6% of its clicks to the open web. Pew Research Center found the same pattern: when an AI Overview appears, people click through far less often. And just this week, Press Gazette reported analysis suggesting Google search traffic to leading UK publishers is set to halve by Q3 2027.

That last one should sting if you run a UK business. This is not an abstract American publisher problem. It is happening to sites here, in your market, competing for your customers.

Google’s response to every one of these studies has been the same: clicks are stable, the methodology is flawed, web publishing is not dead. They have been saying it for the better part of two years now, and the gap between their statements and what site owners see in their own analytics has only widened. SEOs have started calling it “the great decoupling”: impressions climb, clicks fall, and the two lines drift further apart every quarter.

The part that tells you everything

Here is the detail from this story that I find most revealing. Google recently built AI performance reports into Search Console, so you can finally see how your site appears within AI features. One metric is missing from those reports: clicks.

Their explanation is that they are still “working with website owners to understand what insights will be most helpful”. Right. The company that measures everything, that can tell you your average position to two decimal places, cannot show you clicks from AI Overviews. If those click-through rates flattered Google, you would be able to see them by now, probably with a celebratory blog post attached.

When someone claims billions of clicks in a LinkedIn post but will not put the number in your reporting dashboard, believe the dashboard’s silence over the post.

What this means for your business

I am not telling you to abandon Google. That would be daft advice, and the traffic Google still sends remains the most valuable referral source most businesses have. What I am telling you is to stop planning around the assumption that organic traffic levels from 2022 are coming back. They are not.

Here is what I would be doing right now:

Measure what you can actually measure. Since Search Console will not show you AI clicks, segment your own analytics. Watch your branded versus non-branded organic traffic, and watch which landing pages are bleeding. Informational content gets hit hardest by AI Overviews; commercial and local pages hold up better.

Optimise to be the cited source. Google has been making genuine improvements to how links appear in AI features, including preferred sources, top stories within AI Overviews, and better recipe and link formatting. Fox himself said his personal gripe is not being able to find a link to go deeper. That tells you what to build: content with depth, first-hand experience, and specifics that a summary cannot replace. Give the AI a reason to send people to you rather than answer without you.

Value conversions over raw sessions. If AI Overviews absorb the shallow queries, the visitors who do click through arrive better informed and closer to a decision. Fewer visits with stronger intent is a trade you can work with, provided your site converts properly once they land.

Build channels Google cannot switch off. Email lists, direct traffic, a Google Business Profile that pulls its weight locally, and yes, visibility in ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot, which increasingly send their own referrals. Concentration risk was always the danger with organic traffic. It has simply become impossible to ignore.

The bottom line

Google is telling the truth and misleading you at the same time. Billions of clicks weekly is almost certainly accurate. It is also entirely compatible with your traffic being down 30% and falling further by 2027. Both things are true, and only one of them affects your bottom line.

The businesses that come through this well will be the ones that adapted early, measured honestly, and stopped waiting for Google to confirm what their own analytics has been telling them for two years.

If your organic traffic has dipped and you want a proper look at why, and what to do about it, get in touch. I will give you the numbers straight, because someone should.