Last week, Obility’s DBD and I were on a call with a prospect who mentioned she’s been seeing a decrease in organic traffic numbers since August. She’s not alone, Obility’s SEO team has been noticing a decline in organic traffic for a lot of clients in the past 6+ months and so did Wil Reynolds and Rand Fishkin.
One of the benefits of working with an agency is being able to get insights from other clients, so read on to understand why organic traffic is decreasing across the board and what Obility is doing about it.
Why is Organic Traffic Decreasing?
AI Overviews
The topic on everyone’s mind is of course the impact of AI on SEO. AI overviews are the most visible change caused by AI for users. Obility has been monitoring its clients’ presence in AI overviews and has seen a decrease in overall organic traffic across the board, as seen in the graph below. Over the span of 5 months, this client lost more than 4,000 visits to AI overviews.
AI-powered Search Engines
In addition to AI overviews and Answer Search, SEOs have to contend with the rise of AI-powered search engines such as ChatGPT and Perplexity. Looking at the slide below it’s again very obvious that the growth of AI-powered search engines is taking away from the Google and Bing organic traffic. Even though the numbers are small, a 361% increase in organic traffic QoQ cannot be ignored.
Cookie Consent
The first reason that comes to mind is cookie consent tracking. Evidence from some Obility clients has shown a roughly 30% decrease in tracked organic traffic following the implementation of cookie consent banners since the traffic data of users who choose not to accept cookies is no longer available to us. And that’s in cases where the cookies are implemented correctly, we’ve also experienced overzealous cookie tracking that caused the organic traffic to plummet 80% after the implementation.
If you have a European presence and have to comply with GDPR rules you may see an even steeper decrease in the amount of data collected from your visitors.
Zero-Click SERP Features
SERP features are nothing new but new types of SERP features are appearing all the time and dramatically changing the appearance of the SERP. These SERP features can be great for users since they provide an answer at a glance, but the impact on overall organic traffic numbers is undeniable: according to Rand Fishkin’s study nearly 60% of organic searches ended without a click. 
Reddit and Organic Social Results
Reddit and other social media are getting featured more and more frequently in the SERP. According to SEMRush, the organic traffic going to Reddit has increased by 208% in 2024 and the number of organic keywords by 109%.
Reddit and other forums are even getting their own SERP feature (showing up for around 30% of searches, according to a study from SEOClarity).
SERP Distrust
Finally, the last culprit is what I would call “SERP distrust”. Between the abundance of paid results, the absurd AI overviews, and the marketing lingo and sales-y copy of websites that have been optimized to death, users are experiencing SERP fatigue and turning to user-generated content on social media to find the answers they’re looking for. Even the once-trusted sources such as G2 are experiencing a significant decline in visitors.
As a result, users are increasingly turning to user-generated content like Reddit and forums to find answers.
Obility’s Plan of Action
So what is Obility going to do about this?
Taking Advantage of AI Overviews
First, we’re taking full advantage of the AI overviews. Even though they mean fewer clicks on our clients’ results, we know that in B2B a click doesn’t mean a sale and we have always focused on a full-funnel approach to SEO.
See for example Obility’s recent research on AI overviews for Boomi. We saw that queries including “how to” and “vs” returned AI overviews in 40% and 21% of cases, indicating that targeting those keywords is key to growing our AI overview presence.
In addition to monitoring the AI overviews presence of our clients and identifying keywords that are not ranking in AI overviews but would be good candidates, Obility looks at which competitors are ranking in the AI overviews, for what keywords, and how we can bridge the gap by optimizing the client’s website or creating new content.
Because the AI landscape is changing so fast we make it a point to stay on top on SEO news and stay agile in our approach to SEO and content creation.
Mining Organic Social
We discussed earlier the rise of Reddit and other forms of social media in the SERP.
We see this as an opportunity to learn more about what users are truly looking for when researching a solution and how to reach out to them. Too often, I see B2B websites with vague marketing lingo promising to “enhance efficiency” and “boost profitability”, but what does that really mean and how will you do that? Prospects researching a new solution rarely look for these buzzwords and instead go for long-tail keywords addressing their pain points.
Social media mining also allows us to be more proactive. You’ve probably heard SEO being referred to as “pull marketing”. This means we can get in front of users searching for us but don’t promote directly to them the way paid social or retargeting do. Organic social mining helps us get a window into what users are looking for before they land on our website and optimize clients’ websites accordingly.
Auditing Cookie Implementation
We saw earlier that a drop in organic traffic is to be expected after implementing a cookie consent banner. While we can’t bypass cookie consent, we can make sure that the impact on organic performance is as minimal as possible.
Obility provides an analytics assessment to all Obility clients, during which we review the tracking implementation, audit the existing tags, triggers, events, and goals set up (and create new ones when necessary). We also report on the organic traffic before and after the implementation of new cookie banners to measure the percentage of traffic “lost” to users not accepting cookies.
Writing Quality Content
Obility prides itself on producing quality content. You’ve seen earlier in the Boomi example that queries with “how to” and “vs” return the most AI overviews: 50% of the content ranking in these AI overviews was created by Obility. I strongly believe that the SERP distrust I mentioned earlier is creating an appetite for well-written, opinionated content that AI alone can’t produce. In a previous guide to AI I detailed Obility’s philosophy for content creation: create content that is unique, valuable and informative. We’re incorporating stats, quotes, and real-life examples, we’re referencing relevant case studies and articles published by our client and we don’t hesitate to cut out sections (or pages) that don’t provide value.
Clarifying SEO Success
SEO success used to primarily focus on organic traffic growth, organic rankings improvements, and organic conversions increase.
However, organic traffic numbers are no longer indicative of SEO success so Obility is updating its KPIs and reporting to focus on more meaningful indicators:
- Leads, pipeline, and revenue: all marketing efforts point in the same direction: growing revenue. Thanks to our data team we are able to track revenue generated by our SEO efforts and measure the long-term effect of our strategy on pipeline.
- Key event rate: we set up multiple valuable micro-conversion points (filling out a form, watching a demo, downloading a gated or ungated asset, visiting a competitor comparison page or pricing page, signing up for a webinar or subscribing to a newsletter – the more granular the better) as key events to give us a better picture of actual engagement than the standard engagement rate.
- User behavior: rather than focusing on how many users get to the website, we focus on how users interact on the website by monitoring bounce rates, exit rates, session duration, and number of pages viewed.
- AI presence: by now you know that Obility is keeping a close eye on AI presence. In our reports we monitor how many AI overviews we appear in (and the ones we have gained), which keywords appear in AI overviews, the percentage of traffic coming from AI-powered search engines, and new opportunities to grow our AI presence.
Do you want to hear more about how Obility can help you improve your organic strategy? Contact Obility for a free assessment and meet with our SEO experts.
