The conversation usually goes like this. A small-business owner — let's say, the woman who runs the boutique gym in the centro storico of Bologna — comes to me with her Search Console open. She points at the line. "Look. Impressions doubled this year. Doubled. And clicks are flat. Worse than flat, actually. They are down. How is this possible?"
The truth is, it is not only possible. It is the most common thing that has happened to small-business websites in the past nine months, and it has a name now in some of the better SEO circles: the impression-click decoupling. The cause is plain enough — the rise of AI Overviews, which now appear above the classical results for a very large fraction of all queries — but the consequences, and what to actually do about them, are less well understood.
I want to walk through this slowly, because the conversation in the industry has tilted, in my opinion, too far toward despair and not far enough toward useful action. There are three things a small business can do right now, this week, that will convert at least some of those impressions into actual people walking through the door. Let me lay them out.
What is actually happening on the page
Before we get to the fixes, it helps to understand what the search result looks like, in physical terms, on a phone screen — because more than seventy percent of these searches now happen on a phone, and the geometry matters.
When a customer in Bologna searches for small gym near me with personal trainers, the screen they see is roughly this: at the top, the search bar. Below that, an AI Overview block — five or six sentences of synthesised answer, with two or three citations as small, easily-missed links. Below that, depending on the query, perhaps a local map pack with three businesses. Below that, the regular blue links. To see the blue links on a phone, the customer has to scroll past everything else.
In a world where the AI Overview answers the question well enough — yes, here are three good options, with names — the customer often does not scroll. They tap the name. The name is, of course, a link to the business's Google Business Profile, or to a Google Maps result, or to a small in-line snippet. It is not, usually, a link to the business's own website.
This is the impression-click decoupling in concrete form. You were cited — the impression registered in Search Console — but the customer never had to visit your site to act on the citation. They saw your name, saw a star rating, possibly saw a phone number, and either called or moved on.
Why this is not entirely bad news
I want to push back, gently, against the framing that this is a catastrophe. Because in the gym example, the woman in Bologna actually had her busiest spring in three years. The phone calls had gone up. The personal-training enquiries had gone up. The website traffic, narrowly defined, had gone down.
The decoupling, in other words, is not the same thing as a decline in customers. It is a decline in measured website visits, which is a different and narrower problem. For a service business — anyone who books appointments, takes phone calls, or has a physical location — being cited prominently in an AI Overview is, often, more valuable than a click would have been, because the customer arrives at the phone call already partly convinced.
For an e-commerce business that needs the customer to land on a product page and check out, the situation is bleaker. The decoupling there represents a real loss. But for the larger world of small businesses that operate offline and use the website mainly as a credibility surface, the question is not how do I get the clicks back but how do I make sure the impressions convert into the right kind of next step.
That reframing changes everything about the fixes.
Fix one: claim the citation surface
If you are being cited in AI Overviews, the first question is whether the thing being cited about you is the thing you would have chosen to be cited about. Most of the time, the answer is no.
The model picks its summary sentences from whatever appears most prominently and clearly on your page or in your Google Business Profile. If your homepage opens with a vague slogan — welcome to our boutique fitness experience — that is what gets summarised. If it opens with a clear sentence — Bologna's only small-group personal-training studio open seven days a week with sessions starting at six in the morning — that is what gets summarised.
The fix is to audit your three most-cited pages and rewrite the opening two sentences so they contain the exact qualities a customer would want named in a recommendation: what you do, who you serve, what makes you different in concrete terms, and one fact that no competitor can claim. This is, in the end, not a technical exercise. It is a writing exercise. But it is the single change with the biggest impact on what the AI Overview actually says about you.
Fix two: make the citation actionable
The second fix is to ensure that when a customer does scroll, or does tap your name, the next surface they hit gives them somewhere to act. This is more obvious than it sounds and almost always badly executed.
The most common mistake is that the Google Business Profile is incomplete in the small ways that matter. The phone number is correct but the click-to-call attribute is missing. The hours are listed but holiday hours are not. The booking link points to a generic form rather than a category-specific landing page. The result is that a customer who has been beautifully cited in the AI Overview clicks through, encounters friction, and disappears.
Half a day spent fixing these small things will return more value than three months of trying to recover the lost website clicks. The gym in Bologna had a Google Business Profile with eleven photographs, all of which were over a year old, and a booking link that asked the user to choose between fourteen options. We took two new photos in the morning, narrowed the booking link to a single prominent call-to-action — book your first trial session — and the enquiries the following week were thirty percent higher. No new content. No new spending. Just the boring work of closing the loop between the citation and the action.
Fix three: invest in the queries the AI cannot fully answer
The third fix is the long game, and it is the one most small businesses skip because it feels less urgent. But the truth is, it is the only structural move that will protect you when the AI Overviews get even better at answering questions completely.
The idea is straightforward. There are some questions a customer asks that an AI Overview can answer well — what are the hours, what is the address, do they take credit cards. There are other questions that an AI Overview cannot answer well, because the answer requires either deep specifics, personal judgement, or trust signals that only a real human page can provide. Is this gym good for someone returning to exercise after a long break, for instance. Or what should I expect at my first session. Or what is the actual difference between your approach and the franchise across the river.
These questions, the AI Overview will gesture at and then defer to source pages. The citations on these queries lead to clicks far more often than the citations on factual queries, because the customer needs the deeper answer and the AI is honest enough to point them to it.
Investing in deep, honest, opinionated content on these deferral queries is the single best long-term defence against the impression-click decoupling. It is also, of course, harder than writing service-page copy. It requires sitting with a customer for half an hour and asking them what they actually worried about before signing up. It requires writing in your own voice, with your own opinions and limits. It requires admitting where you are not the right fit, which paradoxically makes you more credible to the customers who are.
This is the work I am encouraging the gym owner in Bologna to do this summer. One deferral-query page a month. By the end of the year, she will have a dozen pages that the AI Overview will treat as authoritative sources to point at rather than to summarise away. The clicks will follow.
The metric to actually watch
One last practical note. If you want to know whether any of this is working, do not stare at the clicks line in Search Console. That number has, for the structural reasons above, become a noisy and partial signal.
Watch instead the ratio of phone calls or bookings to AI Overview citations for your highest-intent queries. The phone calls and bookings, you measure however you measure them — most small businesses have call tracking or a booking system that produces a count. The citation count, you measure manually using the method we have written about in our piece on Copilot citation tracking, applied to Google AI Overviews instead. (The mechanics are identical; only the surface differs.)
If that ratio is improving, you are winning the new game, whatever Search Console says. If it is not, the three fixes above are where to start.
I will not pretend this is the same world we used to operate in. The clicks are not coming back. Search Console will, from this point onward, always feel slightly out of step with reality. But the customers — the actual customers — are still findable, still convertible, and still very much worth the work. The visibility trap is real. The escape routes are real too.