AI Overviews and your website traffic: what we measured on our own site

You rank roughly where you did last year. Your pages have not changed, you have picked up a few more reviews, and yet your website feels quieter. Ask a fellow business owner and you will often hear the same story: Google sends fewer people than it used to, and AI Overviews usually get the blame.

These days, a search often starts with a block of text written by Google itself, answering the question before the searcher has opened a single website. Pointing the finger at that block is the obvious move. But a hunch is not a measurement, and a hunch is a poor basis for decisions about your website. So we started counting.

The short version

This is what we found when we tested a set of Belgian searches on 28 October 2026 and laid our own Search Console data next to them.

Question	What we found
How often is there an AI Overview?	On 20 of the 21 searches we tested
Even when someone looks for a tradesperson?	Yes, on all 8, but the map pack still appeared in 7 of those 8
How many clicks does it cost?	Large American studies measure roughly half as many clicks
What did we see on our own site?	Long question style searches went from 10 to 310 impressions in three months, with zero clicks
And our regular clicks?	Almost double the year before, because our rankings improved
Who is hit hardest?	Sites that live on explanations, guides and price questions
What can you do about it?	Get your map listing right, build a page per service and town, state your price and lead time in plain sentences, and measure every month

All figures in this article are as of October 2026. AI Overviews change quickly, so a measurement taken today is no guarantee for next year.

What are Google AI Overviews, and when did they arrive in Belgium?

Google AI Overviews are summaries that Google places at the top of the search results. Google writes the text itself with its Gemini language model, based on a handful of websites, and adds small links to those sources. The searcher gets an answer first and only then the usual list of websites.

They first appeared in Belgium in March 2025, in English only and for signed in users aged 18 and over. Since 20 May 2025 they have also been available in Dutch. Anyone in Flanders who searches in Dutch has been seeing them for roughly eighteen months.

Then there is AI Mode. This is a separate tab next to All, where you hold a conversation with Google much as you would with a chatbot. AI Mode has been available in Belgium since 8 October 2025, and its use is growing fast. According to Google Ads search volumes, people in Belgium searched for google ai mode 480 times a month in December 2025. By September 2026 that figure had reached 2,900.

The difference between the two matters for what follows. An AI Overview sits above the regular results, and your own link is still underneath. In AI Mode you get a conversational answer with the sources alongside it, without the classic list of ten websites.

How often do AI Overviews appear above your result in Belgium?

We tested 21 searches on 28 October 2026. Thirteen of them ask for an explanation or a price. The other eight are searches someone uses to find a tradesperson or an agency, most of them with a town or the region added. We requested the results for Belgium, in Dutch, on desktop, through the measurement service DataForSEO, which fetches the page without personal preferences or search history. We ran every search in Dutch; the table shows them in English.

Search	AI Overview	Map pack	What sits at the top
how much does seo cost	yes	no	AI Overview
how much does a website cost	yes	no	AI Overview
outsource seo	yes	no	AI Overview
optimise google business profile	yes	no	AI Overview
how long does seo take	yes	no	AI Overview
rank higher in google	yes	no	AI Overview
free seo audit	yes	no	regular link, AI Overview below it
local seo	yes	no	AI Overview
new roof cost per m2	yes	no	AI Overview
cost of installing a charging point	yes	no	AI Overview
interior painting cost per m2	yes	no	AI Overview
how much does a heat pump cost	no, only under People also ask	no	regular link
google ads or seo	yes	no	AI Overview
web design sint niklaas	yes	yes	AI Overview
seo agency sint niklaas	yes	yes	AI Overview
web design waasland	yes	yes	AI Overview
website for a contractor	yes	no	AI Overview
roofer sint niklaas	yes	yes	map pack, AI Overview below it
electrician stekene	yes	yes	AI Overview
painter sint niklaas	yes	yes	map pack, AI Overview below it
heat pump installer waasland	yes	yes	AI Overview

Google loaded an AI Overview on 20 of the 21 searches. On the thirteen questions about explanations or prices it appeared twelve times, almost always right at the top. On the eight searches for a tradesperson or agency it appeared all eight times.

We did not quite expect that last result. The good news lies in the map pack, the three businesses from Google Maps: it still appeared on seven of the eight local searches. For roofer Sint Niklaas and painter Sint Niklaas it even sat above the AI Overview.

On 15 of the 21 searches, the first regular link sat directly below the AI Overview. Ranking first on Google now effectively means coming second on the screen.

Which websites does Google cite in AI Overviews?

We could read the full text and every source of eight AI Overviews. They ran to roughly 115 to 290 words, with the middle one around 200. Together they linked to a website 52 times: 29 times to a Belgian site, 18 times to a Dutch one, and the rest to Google itself or to a site from another country.

Which sites they were is the more interesting part. In seven of the eight overviews, no more than two of the cited sites also appeared in the regular results on the same page. For how much does seo cost and how much does a website cost there was no overlap at all. The site in the AI Overview is often not the site that ranks first in the list underneath.

That comes down to how Google builds such an answer. According to Google’s own guidance for site owners, the system runs several related searches at once behind the scenes, on subtopics, and takes its sources from all of those results. Google calls this query fan out. A page that answers a sub question well can therefore be cited without ranking high for the main question.

The local searches told a different story. In the two local AI Overviews we could read in full, Google mentioned businesses that also appeared in the map pack, with a link to their Google Maps listing. For a tradesperson, that is the most important finding of this test: whoever sits in the map pack also has the best chance of being named in the AI Overview. How a contractor or roofer gets into that map pack is explained in our step by step plan for construction companies to rank higher on Google.

Do AI Overviews reduce clicks?

There are no large public measurements for Belgium or for Dutch. There are for the United States, and they all point the same way.

The Pew Research Center tracked the browsing of 900 American adults in March 2025. When they saw an AI summary, they clicked a regular link on 8 percent of those visits. Without a summary, the figure was 15 percent. Barely 1 percent clicked a link inside the summary itself. And 26 percent of those who saw a summary ended their browsing altogether, against 16 percent without one.

The makers of the SEO software Ahrefs looked at the click through rate of 300,000 keywords on desktop in February 2026. Pages ranking first for a term with an AI Overview received, on average, 1.6 percent of impressions as clicks in December 2025. Two years earlier that was still 7.3 percent. Without an AI Overview, their calculation suggests you could have expected 3.7 percent. That works out at 58 percent fewer clicks for the top spot.

Google tells a different story. Its guidance for site owners says the clicks that do come from a results page with an AI Overview are higher quality, because visitors stay longer. That may well be true. But there are fewer of them.

What did we see in our own Search Console?

Those studies cover American searchers and English search terms. So we looked at the figures for offlow.be itself, from July 2025 to the end of October 2026. Three things stood out.

A drop in impressions that had nothing to do with AI

First, a trap you will also run into in your own data. On a great many sites, impressions in Google fell sharply between August and October 2025, while clicks held steady or even rose. We saw the same on ours. Anyone looking only at that chart would conclude that AI Overviews had struck.

The real cause was technical. In mid September 2025, Google switched off a parameter that let software request a hundred results at once. Rank tracking tools did this on a massive scale, and according to most analyses each request counted as an impression for your site, even if you ranked 70th. In an analysis of around 320 Search Console accounts, 87.7 percent of sites saw their impressions drop afterwards. The average position in Search Console improved at the same time, simply because all those impressions in far off positions disappeared.

So never compare a month before mid September 2025 with a month after it. You are guaranteed to draw the wrong conclusion.

A new kind of search: long questions, zero clicks

The second thing we saw is genuinely new. Searches are turning up in Search Console that hardly anyone would type into a search bar. Full sentences, often ending in a question mark, as if someone were talking to a chatbot.

Period	Long question searches	Impressions	Clicks
28 April to 26 July 2026	7	10	0
28 July to 26 October 2026	34	310	0

We counted as a long question every search of seven words or more, or with a question mark. Eight of those 34 had an average position in the top three, together worth 108 impressions. Number of clicks: zero.

Three examples from our Search Console, translated from Dutch:

• how much does seo through an agency in belgium cost for a small business? Average position 5.4 and 11 impressions.
• are businesses happy with outsourcing their seo? Average position 5.5 and 16 impressions.
• who can find out why my website brings in so few enquiries? Average position 5.9 and 8 impressions.

Where do they come from? Google counts AI Overviews and AI Mode in the regular Performance report in Search Console, under Web. Those long questions look a lot like the way people talk in AI Mode or to a chatbot. We cannot say for certain where each question comes from, because Search Console does not split it out. What we can see is that we are shown, and nobody clicks.

310 impressions, zero clicks. Your page is shown as a source, but nobody comes by.

And our regular clicks?

This is the part of the story you rarely read. In September and October 2026, offlow.be received almost twice as many clicks from Google as in the same months a year earlier. AI Overviews were already available in Dutch in September 2025, so the comparison is fair. What did change is that, on average, we ranked higher than a year earlier.

The lesson is clear. For a site that wants to be found locally, where you rank still matters more than the block hanging above you. Climb the rankings and you win clicks, AI Overview or not.

The new AI report in Search Console

In June 2026 Google announced a separate Search Console report for its AI features. It shows how often your pages appeared in AI Overviews, in AI Mode and in the AI features of Discover, by page, by country and by period. According to Google it has been open to all websites worldwide since 31 August 2026, although some accounts do not show it yet.

It has two limitations. The report only shows impressions, not clicks, and no search queries either. You can see that you appeared in an AI answer, but not what it brought you. For that you still have to do the maths yourself, and further down you will read how.

Why do AI Overviews hurt a local tradesperson less than a news site?

An AI Overview does one thing very well: answering a question that text can answer. What does a charging point cost, how long does SEO take, what is the difference between two kinds of roof insulation. Someone asking that kind of question often has enough after reading the block.

But a summary will not fix a leaking roof. Someone who searches for a roofer in Sint Niklaas is not looking for an explanation but for someone to come round. That person calls, opens a profile in the map pack or clicks through to a site with photos of real roofs. That search ends at a business, not at an answer.

That is why AI Overviews mostly hit sites that live on explanations: news sites, guides and comparison sites. For the question about the cost of a new roof per m2, Google built its answer from a mix of roofers, guides and quote comparison sites, one of them Dutch. If you want to be part of that answer as a tradesperson, you need to state your own price clearly on your site. Otherwise a quote comparison site fills in the answer for you.

That does not make explanatory pages worthless. They show Google what you are good at and give you a chance to be cited as a source. Just do not count on them as your main source of enquiries any more.

Worked example: what does an AI Overview cost a roofer in Sint Niklaas?

Let us make it concrete with real search volumes and click prices from Google Ads, as of October 2026, for a roofer based in Sint Niklaas.

The price question first. The Dutch searches for new roof price and new roof price per m2 add up to roughly 300 a month. Suppose you rank third for those terms. Without an AI Overview, roughly one in ten searchers clicks there, so around 30 visitors. Take off the 58 percent from Ahrefs and about 13 remain. You lose 17 visitors a month. But those searchers live all over Flanders, and the Waasland region is only a small part of it. Of those 17, we estimate at most one lives in your service area.

Now the local search. The Dutch search for roofer Sint Niklaas gets 320 searches a month. In our test the map pack sat above the AI Overview, and the overview named businesses from that map. Suppose four in ten searchers open a profile in the map, and that you, as one of the three, get a third of them. That is 43 people opening your profile. If one in five calls or emails, that makes 8 to 9 enquiries. Win one in three and you have almost three jobs a month.

What	Price question: new roof	Local: roofer Sint Niklaas
Searches per month	about 300, all of Flanders	320, in and around Sint Niklaas
AI Overview in our test	yes, right at the top	yes, below the map pack
Visitors in third place without AI Overview	about 30	not applicable
Visitors with AI Overview	about 13	43 profiles opened in the map
From your own service area	at most 1 of the 17 you lose	almost all of them
Enquiries per month	fewer than 1	8 to 9
Jobs per month	0	almost 3
Profit at €1,800 per job	€0	about €5,200

We assume an average roofing job of €9,000 and a margin of 20 percent, so €1,800 profit per job. Run the numbers with your own figures. The ratio stays the same in almost every trade: on the price question, the AI Overview costs this roofer a handful of visitors from outside his region, while the map pack brings him most of his work from a single local search.

If you think you can skip the map pack by buying ads, do the sums as well. A click on roofer Sint Niklaas costs €4.52 on average in Google Ads, and anyone who wants the top ad spot pays up to just over €13 per click. For 43 visitors you are soon spending around €195 a month, every single month.

How can you see in Search Console whether AI Overviews are costing you traffic?

You do not have to guess. Half an hour in Search Console is enough to see whether the pattern shows up on your own site. Here is how.

1. Pick two periods that both fall after mid September 2025, for example the last three months and the same three months a year earlier.
2. Open the Performance report, choose Compare and switch on impressions, clicks and average position.
3. Go to the queries tab and look for terms where your position stayed the same or improved, your impressions rose and your clicks fell. That is the typical trace of an AI Overview.
4. Filter on queries containing what, how, how much or cost, and then on your service plus your town. Compare the two groups.
5. Search the suspicious terms yourself in an incognito window and check whether there is an AI Overview and who is named in it.
6. Open the new AI report and look at which pages appear. Those are the pages Google uses as a source.

If you find the pattern on an explanatory page, that is normal and no reason to panic. If you find it on your service plus town, something else is going on. Often there is a competitor in the map pack or a quote comparison site in the overview, and it is worth digging deeper. If you want someone to investigate it thoroughly for you, that is a job for an SEO audit.

What can you do yourself this week?

Here are seven things you can do without an agency, and they will tell you more straight away than any article about AI.

1. List your five most important services with your town added and search for them in an incognito window. For each search, note whether there is an AI Overview, whether there is a map pack, and who gets named.
2. Do the same for the three questions customers ask you most often on the phone, such as what does it cost, how long does it take and when can you start.
3. Open your Google Business Profile and fill in every field that is still empty. In the local AI Overviews we read, the businesses named also appeared in the map pack. Which fields carry the most weight is explained in our article on the eleven fields of your Google Business Profile.
4. On every service page, add a short paragraph with your starting price, your usual lead time and the towns you work in. In plain sentences, not hidden in an image or a PDF.
5. Answer those three customer questions on your site, each under its own subheading, with an answer of two or three sentences using your own figures.
6. Compare your last three months in Search Console with the same months last year, as described above, and note which terms show the pattern.
7. From now on, count your calls and form submissions every month. Visitors are a means; enquiries are the goal.

With these seven steps, within a week you will know whether AI Overviews are a problem for you, and if so, where.

The mistakes we see most often

These are the errors that come up most often around AI Overviews.

Panicking over fewer impressions

A sharp drop in impressions around September 2025 is, for most sites, the result of that technical change at Google, not of AI. Look at your clicks and enquiries first, before you change anything on your site.

Shutting your site off from AI

Some business owners want to keep their text out of AI Overviews. A nosnippet setting does that, but Google then also stops showing a snippet of your page in the regular results, and you lose more than you gain. The setting that refuses the use of your content for AI training, on the other hand, changes nothing in what you see in Google Search. Since June 2026 Google has been testing a separate switch in Search Console in the United Kingdom that takes a site out of its AI features. At the time, Google gave no date for other countries.

Rewriting everything for a robot

Special files, extra code, pages made up of nothing but bullet points. Google itself says that no extra files, markup or special optimisation are needed to appear in an AI Overview. What counts is what always counted: a page that answers the question concretely and honestly, written for a human.

Prices on request

An AI Overview on a price question uses whatever amounts it finds. If your price is nowhere to be found, it becomes the price of a quote comparison site or of your competitor, and that sets your customer’s expectations before they ever call you. A starting price with what it includes beats no price at all.

When can you safely ignore this?

There are three situations in which AI Overviews barely affect you.

If almost all your work comes through word of mouth, regular clients or people typing in your business name, very little changes. Someone searching for your name usually finds your site right at the top.

If your site currently ranks 30th or lower, the AI Overview is not your problem. Hardly anyone clicked down there anyway. Rankings first, then the question of what sits above them.

And if your customers come from one or two towns and you have a strong Google Business Profile, your gains lie in reviews and photos of your own work, not in a study of AI.

Where it does matter: online shops with lots of explanatory pages, sites that live on guides and price comparisons, and businesses selling to other businesses, where a customer does a lot of research before contacting anyone. There, an AI Overview can take away a large share of your visitors, and measuring is the first job.

How do you get your business into an AI Overview?

Google says there is no special trick for this, and that matches what we see. Being named in an AI Overview takes the same things as being found on Google, only more concretely.

• Answer the questions customers really ask on your own site, with your own prices and lead times.
• Put your town and service area in plain text, not just in a map.
• Keep your Google Business Profile complete and up to date, because the local overviews draw on it.

How AI systems choose their sources is explained in more detail on our page about being found in ChatGPT and in Google’s AI answers. Whether your business is already mentioned today, you can check with our five minute test. And the foundation stays the same as ever: the nine steps to rank higher on Google, in the right order.

If you would rather have it done for you, a one off fix for your own town starts from €349, or monthly from €195 for Local and from €419 for Regional. Cancel any month, no setup fees, and always with a free audit first. All prices exclude VAT, as of November 2026. What you end up paying depends on the extras you choose. You can read more about our approach on our page about SEO for businesses in the Waasland region.

Frequently asked questions

Want to know what AI Overviews do to your traffic?

Send Silvio a message through our contact form or call 0495 46 80 90, and tell us which services and towns matter most to you. We will look at whether AI Overviews are costing you clicks, or whether something else is going on.

Would you rather see it all in black and white first? Then request your free website audit. Within 24 hours on working days you will know where you rank on Google, who ranks above you and whether ChatGPT mentions your business. To see what such a report looks like section by section, read our example of a real audit report.

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