Fewer Clicks From Google's AI Summaries: What B2B Websites Should Change

The pattern is familiar to many marketing teams by now. Search Console shows impressions holding steady or rising, clicks flat or falling, and the monthly report blames “AI.” Meanwhile the sales team says buyers still find the company, still ask for quotations and still call. Both observations can be true at once, and the useful question for a B2B company is not whether Google’s AI summaries take clicks but which clicks they take, and what the website should do about the ones that remain.

This piece looks at the independent evidence, sets it against what Google says, and turns both into specific changes for a supplier, contractor or distributor whose buyers still need to contact someone before they buy.

What the independent evidence actually shows

The most cited independent measurement comes from Pew Research Center, published on 22 July 2025. Pew analysed the real browsing activity of 900 US adults who agreed to share it, covering their Google searches in March 2025. It did not survey opinions; it recorded what people clicked.

Three further findings matter more to a B2B site than the headline. First, about 18% of the searches in the study produced an AI summary, so most searches still did not show one. Second, the trigger was the shape of the query: searches of one or two words produced a summary 8% of the time, searches of ten words or more 53% of the time, and queries starting with a question word such as “what” or “why” 60% of the time. Third, a few large platforms featured heavily: Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit together made up 15% of the sources cited in summaries, a similar share to the 17% they held in standard results. The two Pew authors, Athena Chapekis and Anna Lieb, later set out the method and a regression analysis with Sono Shah and Aaron Smith in a paper submitted to arXiv on 5 August 2026, which reports that the associations held after accounting for the query features that make a summary more likely to appear.

What Google says, and how to reconcile the two

Google disputes the idea of a general collapse in traffic. In an August 2025 post, Liz Reid, Google’s head of Search, wrote that total organic click volume to websites had been “relatively stable year-over-year,” that Google was sending “slightly more quality clicks” than a year earlier, and that third-party reports of dramatic declines were often based on “flawed methodologies.” Google defines a quality click as one where the user does not quickly click back. The post gives no underlying figures. Google’s developer documentation on AI features and your website repeats the claim that clicks from results pages with AI Overviews “are higher quality”, meaning people spend more time on the site, and suggests tracking conversions and time on site in tools such as Google Analytics as well as clicks.

The two positions are less contradictory than they sound. Pew measured click behaviour per visit to a results page; Google talks about total volume across a growing number of searches, and concedes in the same post that traffic is shifting, with some sites losing and others gaining. For a B2B website the practical reading is this:

• Definitional and educational queries are the most exposed. Long, question-shaped searches (“what is the difference between a wet and dry riser system”) are exactly the ones Pew found most likely to produce a summary.
• Short, specific and commercial queries are likely to be less exposed. Pew found summaries on only 8% of one- or two-word searches. A buyer searching a product code, a brand name plus “distributor Riyadh”, or your company name is more likely to see ordinary results and click.
• The visitors who still arrive have often done their reading already. If Google is right about quality, the visitor who lands on your service page arrives closer to a decision, and the page has to be ready for that visitor.

First, confirm that AI summaries are really the cause

Many traffic drops blamed on AI turn out to have other causes. Google’s own guide to debugging Search traffic drops lists algorithmic updates, technical problems, security and spam issues, seasonality, site migrations and reporting glitches. Before changing the website, run four checks in Search Console:

1. Compare year over year, not month over month. Set the Performance report to 16 months and compare the last three months with the same period a year earlier. Regional B2B demand can also shift around Ramadan, the summer and the exhibition calendar, so a short-term dip may simply be seasonal.
2. Split pages from queries. If the loss sits in a handful of blog articles answering definitions, AI summaries are a plausible cause. If service pages or the home page lost clicks too, look for technical or ranking problems first.
3. Separate branded from non-branded searches. The branded and non-branded query filter in the Performance report shows whether people searching for your company name still arrive. Stable branded clicks with falling non-branded clicks is consistent with answers being satisfied on the results page, although a ranking loss on generic terms can look the same. The filter is not available for sub-properties or sites with few impressions.
4. Look at where you appear in AI features. Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode traffic is counted inside the normal Web search type, and Search Console’s generative AI performance report shows impressions of your links in those features by page, country and device. Google’s help page states it was rolled out to all websites worldwide by 31 August 2026; it may not appear for sites with too few impressions.

If the checks point to technical issues, fix those first; nothing below compensates for pages Google cannot crawl. Our technical SEO audit checklist covers that ground; it is also where our SEO and search visibility work begins.

Six website changes for the clicks that remain

1. Make service and product pages the destination, not the blog

An AI summary can explain what a pressure-reducing valve does. It cannot tell a buyer whether you hold stock in Dammam, which approvals the product carries, the minimum order, the lead time to site or which brands you represent exclusively. That information is what a visitor who has already read the summary comes for. Audit each service and product page against one question: does it answer what only a supplier can answer? Coverage areas, approvals and certificates, brands represented, typical project types and what the buyer needs to send for a quotation belong near the top, not in a PDF at the bottom.

2. Put the contact path where those visitors land

If fewer people arrive, each arrival matters more. Check every page that receives organic traffic, including old articles, for a visible next step on mobile without scrolling: a quotation form with few fields, a click-to-call number and a WhatsApp link where that is how your buyers prefer to talk. A long article that ends with a generic “contact us” link wastes the visitor who scrolled to the end because they were interested.

3. Rewrite educational articles for the reader who clicks anyway

Do not delete educational content; it is often what gets a site cited in a summary in the first place. Change its job. Open with a direct answer of two or three sentences, because the reader who clicks through from a summary already has the basics. Then add what a summary cannot carry: worked examples from your sector, a selection table, the questions a consultant or procurement team will ask, and a short section on “what this means for your project” that links to the relevant service page. For example, an HVAC contractor’s article on chiller sizing might end with the site data it needs from the client to give a proposal.

4. Make the company unmistakable to machines and people

Google states there are no special optimisations, AI text files or extra schema needed to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode; the ordinary requirement is that a page is indexed and eligible to show a snippet. What helps is clarity about who you are. Use one consistent company name in English and Arabic across the site, the Google Business Profile and directories; keep a full about page with address, registration details where appropriate and real contact information; and add Organization structured data to the home page with name, logo, address, telephone and links to official profiles. None of it is required, and none of it guarantees a citation, but it removes ambiguity when a buyer searches your name after reading about you elsewhere.

5. Put proof on the page instead of describing it

A visitor who arrives late in the decision wants evidence, not adjectives. Project references with location and scope, named partner brands, certificates as readable images with their numbers, and short case pages per sector do more than a paragraph claiming quality. This is also content an AI summary cannot reproduce convincingly, because it belongs to you.

6. Measure inquiries per landing page, not sessions

Google’s own documentation suggests tracking conversions and time on site, not only clicks. Set up form submissions, calls and WhatsApp clicks as key events in Google Analytics 4, as described in our guide to GA4 key events for lead tracking, and report organic performance as inquiries by landing page. A month with 20% fewer sessions and the same number of quotation requests is not a problem to solve.

What to stop doing

• Publishing thin definition posts for traffic. Queries like “what is a fire pump” are the ones most likely to be answered on the results page. Write them only if you can add something a summary cannot.
• Buying “AI optimisation” add-ons that Google says are unnecessary. Special AI files and extra markup are not requirements, according to Google’s documentation.
• Blocking AI features out of frustration. Controls such as nosnippet and the newer Search generative AI control exist, but limiting your presence in summaries also removes you from the links inside them. We weigh that trade-off in our piece on Google’s generative AI control.
• Judging SEO on last year’s traffic targets. If the brief still says “grow sessions by X%,” rewrite it around qualified inquiries.

A note for Gulf and Egyptian B2B sites

Two regional details deserve attention. These are our judgements rather than measured findings, since no regional click study exists. First, bilingual sites have two sets of exposure. In its Arabic AI Mode announcement, Google says early AI Mode users ask questions two or three times the length of traditional searches, and Pew’s data shows long, question-shaped queries are where summaries appear most often. Arabic content written as full questions and answers may therefore meet summaries more often than short English product searches, so check both language versions separately in Search Console by page. Second, many regional B2B buyers prefer to move from search to WhatsApp or a phone call, so a visit can be short and still count. That makes event tracking on those buttons more useful than time on page.

Start with one export: twelve months of Search Console clicks by page, split into educational articles and service or product pages, set beside the inquiries each page produced. If the losses sit in definition articles while quotation requests hold, the site needs stronger contact paths, not more content. If service pages are falling too, look for a technical or competitive cause before blaming AI.