Last year I wrote an article on the impact of the Google AI Overview on organic traffic to a popular New Zealand site.

Read last year's article

Well the bad news is that the fall in organic traffic continues - January 2025 was 25% down on January 2024 and January 2026 was 30% down on January 2025 which means that organic traffic in January 2026 was around half what it was in January 2024.

The continued fall in traffic is due to the Google AI Overview appearing for many more searches than previously causing organic click-through rates to plunge even lower.

A key set of phrases recorded a click-through rate of 18% in September 2024, the month before the Google AI Overview was introduced to New Zealand. In March 2026, that click-through rate was 3.2%. So despite an increase in impressions for those terms of 23%, the number of clicks to the website has fallen dramatically.

Clicks in September 2024: 3,059

Clicks in March 2026: 675

Tracking the click-through rate for the past 18 months, the downward trend is consistent and hasn't flattened out as yet.

It is currently not possible to track clicks through to websites from the Google AI Overview - Google says it will appear as normal organic search traffic and will be included in Google Search Console data but not separated out.

But it is possible to track traffic from AI platforms such as ChatGPT and Copilot. And they deliver alarmingly tiny amounts of traffic. For a popular NZ website, this is the split of total NZ traffic for the past 4 weeks.

So total AI traffic is just 0.061% of total traffic. Ecosia is almost 5 times the traffic of AI. Does this mean you don't need to pay any attention to how often your content is served on AI platforms? Not at all, but it very much depends on the nature of your business whether it is worth significant investment.