AI-Generated Results Impact Organic Traffic by 8.45% Study Reveals

A recent study by TUYA Digital, the Generative & Search Engine Optimization Agency in Bucharest, reveals the impact of the recent introduction of AI Overviews on organic traffic. For those of you who still don’t know that already, Google has just rolled out the AI Overviews in the US, which are AI-generated results for various queries, much like Rich Snippets.

As seen above, this sort of AI-generated answer is placed above the organic feed results. That means that users won’t need to browse ten organic results on Google’s first page to find out what the generated answer offers – how to clean fabric. This impacts the organic traffic that HGTV, in this case, which is the first organic result, would have gotten, as well as the rest of the websites that are ranking for these keywords.

So, how much would this impact the organic traffic?

According to a rather complicated equation used by TUYA Digital to determine the drop in organic traffic following the introduction of this AI-based feature, the average we should expect is 8.45%, with variations according to your average position on various keywords.

DETAILED CTR IMPACT OF GENERATIVE RESULTS ON ORGANIC TRAFFIC

Here are the calculated impacts for positions 1-10 using the revised formula, which incorporates additional factors such as query type, SERP features, and device type:

Position	Current CTR (%)	New CTR (%)	Percentage Decrease (%)
1	28.5	25.54	10.40
2	15.0	13.51	9.96
3	11.0	9.95	9.53
4	8.0	7.27	9.10
5	6.0	5.48	8.66
6	5.0	4.59	8.23
7	4.0	3.69	7.80
8	3.0	2.78	7.36
9	2.5	2.33	6.93
10	2.5	2.34	6.50

There is more to be understood, even by Google itself, in terms of algorithm, industries targeted, and keywords triggering this AI Overviews feature. Still, one thing is clear: like Bing introduced Copilot in its classic search, Google introduced Gemini, its Generative Engine, and called this feature AI Overviews. This was their answer to Microsoft’s move. Yet, this impacts the organic traffic.

So, 8.45% might not sound like much, but imagine you live out of a fixed revenue from your online business and you suddenly got it dropped by 10%, this is when you were positioned as number 1 in the feed. Would you care for this drop? But of course you would!

The good news is that this feature has not been rolled out in Europe. The bad news is that Google plans to do so by the end of 2024. This offers European businesses plenty of time to prepare for this change and to adopt generative engine optimization, which is quite a change in the SEO game.

GEO might become the next SEO or, as some experts call it, an additional feature the SEO agencies should include in their services. Either way, the era of generative engines has just begun, and you are either prepared for it or disappear from the market.