Our organic search traffic dropped 34% in 6 months and SEO wasn't broken. AI Overviews just ate it. Here's what we switched to and what's actually working.
b2b saas, been doing content marketing for about four years, built a solid SEO foundation, ranking page one for a bunch of high-intent keywords. felt good about where we were
then starting q3 last year the numbers just started sliding. not a penalty, not a technical issue, nothing changed on our end. AI Overviews started appearing for basically every query we ranked for and our CTR fell off a cliff. organic sessions down 34% over six months despite holding rankings
we're not alone in this. seeing the same pattern everywhere i look
so we made some changes and i want to share what's actually moved the needle for us three months in
what we stopped doing:
- writing informational content designed to rank for how-to queries. AI answers those now. nobody clicks through
- obsessing over keyword density and traditional on-page SEO signals for top-of-funnel content
what we shifted to:
GEO structuring content specifically to get cited by AI systems. entity-clear writing, structured data, authoritative sourcing. it's different from traditional SEO but the logic is sound. if you can't get the click, get the citation
owned community. started a small slack group for our ICP six months ago. 340 members now, zero ad spend, consistently our highest converting channel
reddit and niche forums. not spammy, actual participation. the referral traffic quality is insane compared to anything else we run
newsletter. boring answer but 47% open rate and it's where our pipeline actually comes from
the hard truth is that informational SEO as a top-of-funnel strategy is basically dead for most categories. the question now is whether your brand gets cited by AI or ignored by it
curious what others are seeing in their own traffic data this year