u/Johannascot

running marketing for a small DTC brand, sub $1m revenue, niche category. last 6 weeks ive seen referral traffic flatten while mentions of our brand in user feedback go up. a friend at a similar brand said the same thing.

so here’s what im thinking: people are reading summaries of our content, reviews, positioning somewhere else, without clicking through. what do we do about that?

not panicking. but it matters.

things ive considered:

lean in. write content that’s easy to reuse and gets our brand mentioned more. risk: hard to measure, harder to justify internally.

lean back. invest more in formats that require direct engagement. video, tools, community. risk: slower reach.

hybrid. simple, summary-style content for visibility, deeper or interactive stuff for people who actually click.

what im stuck on: how do you tell if this is bringing in new customers vs just replacing visits you would have gotten anyway. no clean tracking. some new signups mention “found via chat,” still small but growing.

curious how other small brands are handling this. are you doing anything about it now, or waiting it out? if you are, what are you actually testing?

To sum it up, after AI Overview showed up, my site's impressions went up but clicks dropped a lot.

I used to write general content for traffic, hoping some of it would convert. But after AI Overview rolled in, people stopped clicking through to read my site, they just go off the AI Overview summary.

I want to drop the content that isn't converting and focus on the parts that actually bring clicks and sales. From that angle, AI Overview is kind of a useful tool. It tells you which pages on your site aren't doing real business for you.

Are you guys changing your content strategy because of AI Overview, or thinking about changing it?

I was checking a few local searches today, mostly contractor type stuff, and the actual website results are buried pretty far down.

You get the paid ads first, then the Google Guaranteed listings, then the map pack with reviews, photos, call buttons, directions, all that. By the time a normal organic result shows up, it’s already way lower than I expected.

So now I’m wondering if I’ve been thinking about local SEO the wrong way.

A lot of people talk about ranking the website, building service pages, writing city pages, getting backlinks, etc. That still matters, I’m sure. But for a local business that mostly wants phone calls, it seems like the GBP listing might be where most of the action is.

Especially for stuff like plumbers, roofers, electricians, HVAC, cleaning services.

For those of you running local businesses or managing local clients, how much time are you actually spending on GBP compared with the website?

Are reviews, photos, categories, citations, and map visibility getting more attention now, or are you still mainly focused on the site?

Curious what’s actually moving the needle for calls.

been running seo for an ecommerce brand. we own the main site plus a couple exact match domains we never really used.

recently started putting category pages on the EMDs and kept the main site focused on broader terms. they picked up rankings for some generics we struggled with before.

unexpected side effect was we pulled back some PPC spend because those terms started coming in organically.

now the tricky part is managing content across domains without stepping on our own toes. feels easy to drift into cannibalization.

anyone else doing this? how are you handling overlap between domains, and are you seeing any real benefit from having multiple listings in the SERP?

Pulled our Q1 traffic report yesterday and noticed something I haven't seen before. There's a new referral category showing up that looks like it's coming from AI chat interfaces. Not a huge number yet, maybe 3-4% of total sessions, but the conversion rate on those visits is actually higher than organic search. The weird part is I can't figure out exactly which AI platforms are sending this traffic. Some of it shows up as direct, some as referral with really generic source names. Anyone else noticing this in their analytics? Trying to figure out if this is worth investigating further or just noise.