For years, savvy DTC operators treated Google organic search as a near-free acquisition channel — a way to offset the relentless climb in Meta CPMs. Build the right content stack, earn the featured snippet, and watch qualified traffic roll in at near-zero marginal cost. That playbook is now under serious pressure.
Since Google began rolling out AI Overviews broadly across U.S. commercial and informational queries in late 2025, merchants in categories ranging from skincare and pet supplies to home fitness and kitchenware are reporting double-digit drops in clicks for queries that previously drove consistent top-of-funnel volume. The culprit: Google’s AI-generated answer boxes are resolving the user’s question directly on the search results page — no click required.
The numbers merchants are sharing internally are alarming. According to data pulled from Semrush’s enterprise dashboard and corroborated by three Shopify agency operators speaking with Ecommerce Times, broad informational queries like “best collagen powder for women” or “how to choose a standing desk” — the kind of content DTC brands have spent years ranking for — are now generating 22 to 38% fewer clicks than the same queries generated in Q2 2025, even when the brand holds the number-one organic position.
What Exactly Are AI Overviews Doing to Ecommerce Search Traffic?
Google’s AI Overviews sit above traditional organic results and synthesize answers from multiple sources, often including the very pages that previously ranked first. The practical effect for ecommerce SEO is that Google is consuming your content to answer the query, then giving users little incentive to visit your site.
“We had a blog post on our site that was pulling about 14,000 organic sessions a month for mattress firmness comparison queries,” said Carly Dunne, head of growth at Brooklyn-based sleep brand Drift & Rest. “After AI Overviews started triggering consistently on that query in February, we’re at about 8,400 sessions for the same period. The ranking didn’t change. The answer box just ate our clicks.”
“The ranking didn’t change. The answer box just ate our clicks.” — Carly Dunne, Head of Growth, Drift & Rest
The damage is not uniform. Queries with clear commercial intent — “buy standing desk under $400” or “collagen supplements free shipping” — are less affected because Google’s Shopping ads and merchant listings still dominate those results. It is the mid-funnel informational content — comparison guides, ingredient explainers, buyer’s guides — where the traffic erosion is most severe.
Kyle Stout, founder of email marketing agency Elevate & Scale and an adviser to several seven-figure DTC brands, says he’s been warning clients about over-reliance on informational SEO since Q3 2025. “The brands that built their organic moat entirely on blog content and comparison pages are getting hit hardest. The brands that focused on category-level product SEO — strong PDPs, structured data, review schema — are holding up better.”
Which Product Categories Are Being Hit the Hardest?
Not every vertical is equally exposed. Based on interviews with operators and agency leaders, the categories seeing the steepest AI Overview impact on organic clicks include:
- Supplements and wellness: Informational queries like “what does ashwagandha do” or “best magnesium for sleep” now almost universally trigger AI Overviews.
- Home goods and furniture: Comparison and buying-guide queries have been heavily absorbed, particularly for mattresses, sofas, and office furniture.
- Pet care: Queries around pet health, breed-specific product recommendations, and food comparisons are heavily affected.
- Consumer electronics accessories: “Best [X] for [use case]” formats are now almost entirely answered within the SERP.
- Apparel and footwear: Styling guides and fit advice content is being consumed, though transactional queries remain relatively intact.
Categories with strong visual and SKU-level purchase intent — jewelry, sneakers, custom products — are seeing less disruption because Google continues to surface Shopping ads and visual carousels prominently on those queries.
Are Google Shopping Ads Picking Up the Slack?
For brands with the budget to compensate, Google Shopping and Performance Max campaigns are becoming more important as organic informational traffic declines. But the math does not always work in the brand’s favor.
“We’ve seen brands shift spend from content production toward PMax to cover the traffic gap,” said Rishi Malhotra, director of paid search at digital agency Common Thread Collective. “The problem is that PMax CPCs on competitive product queries have moved up about 12 to 18% year-over-year. So you’re paying more to replace traffic that used to be essentially free.”
“You’re paying more to replace traffic that used to be essentially free.” — Rishi Malhotra, Director of Paid Search, Common Thread Collective
Google’s Shopping Graph, which now incorporates merchant feed data, product reviews from verified sources, and real-time pricing signals, does offer brands a path to visibility even in an AI Overview-dominated SERP. Merchants who have invested in clean product feeds via Feedonomics or DataFeedWatch, earned substantial Google Customer Reviews volume, and maintained competitive pricing are appearing inside AI Overview citations more frequently — which at least provides brand exposure even without a guaranteed click.
That said, appearing as a citation in an AI Overview is not the same as owning a traffic-generating ranking. Several brand operators noted that even when their domain is cited inside an AI Overview, click-through rates to those cited pages are well below what traditional featured snippets delivered.
What Tactical Adjustments Are Working Right Now?
Agency leaders and brand operators are converging on a handful of tactics that are showing measurable results in the current environment:
- Doubling down on product page SEO: Brands are investing more heavily in long-form PDP content — detailed ingredient or material callouts, comparison tables embedded directly on product pages, and FAQ schema — to capture queries that AI Overviews are less likely to absorb cleanly.
- Building owned audience harder and faster: Email and SMS list growth has become a higher strategic priority. “If Google is going to keep traffic on its own properties, you need to own your audience directly,” said Dunne. Brands working with Klaviyo and Attentive are accelerating pop-up and post-purchase capture flows to compensate for reduced top-of-funnel organic traffic.
- Investing in video SEO on YouTube: YouTube, owned by Google, is not subject to the same AI Overview cannibalization. Brands creating product review and tutorial content on YouTube are seeing those videos surface prominently in Google results, often in positions that AI Overviews don’t displace.
- Structured data and E-E-A-T signals: Operators and agencies are prioritizing expert authorship, first-person product testing content, and enhanced schema markup to make their pages more likely to be cited — and clicked — within AI Overviews rather than simply summarized and bypassed.
- Diversifying acquisition into TikTok and Pinterest SEO: Some brands are treating TikTok’s in-app search function and Pinterest’s visual search as supplemental organic channels where AI-generated summaries are not yet a factor.
Is There a Long-Term SEO Strategy That Still Makes Sense for DTC?
The strategic consensus among operators and SEO practitioners is that pure informational content at scale is a diminishing asset. The brands that will hold organic traffic longest are those building what Stout calls “defensible specificity” — content that AI systems cannot easily synthesize because it is rooted in proprietary data, specific customer outcomes, or first-party research.
“A generic ‘what is retinol’ article is dead,” Stout said. “But a page that says ‘we tested five retinol concentrations on 400 customers over 90 days and here’s what happened to each skin type’ — that’s something Google’s AI Overview struggles to replicate and will actually cite.”
“A generic ‘what is retinol’ article is dead. But proprietary data — that’s something Google’s AI Overview struggles to replicate.” — Kyle Stout, Founder, Elevate & Scale
Several Shopify-native brands are beginning to treat their post-purchase survey data, loyalty program behavioral data, and customer review corpora as SEO inputs — turning real customer language and outcomes into content that has genuine differentiation in an AI-flattened search landscape.
Northbeam and Triple Whale users are also starting to see their attribution dashboards reflect the shift — with direct and email channels claiming a larger share of attributed revenue as organic search’s contribution shrinks. For CFO-level conversations about channel economics, that shift is making it harder to justify large content production budgets without a parallel investment in retention infrastructure to capture and re-engage the audience those pieces do generate.
What Should Operators Do in the Next 90 Days?
The urgency is real. Operators who wait to adapt risk watching a meaningful organic traffic base erode further before the next Google algorithm cycle provides any new signals. The most actionable near-term moves, based on operator interviews:
- Run a query-level audit in Google Search Console segmented by informational versus transactional intent, and identify which of your top 50 traffic-driving queries now trigger AI Overviews.
- Pull click-through rate trends for those queries over the last six months. Any query where CTR has dropped more than 15% without a ranking change is an AI Overview victim.
- Reallocate content budget from generic informational posts toward structured PDP content, original research, and customer-outcome case studies.
- Accelerate email and SMS capture across all touchpoints — AI Overviews make owned audience even more valuable as an insurance policy against future search volatility.
- Test YouTube content production for your top five informational queries and measure whether video rankings can recover the sessions your blog content is losing.
“The brands that are treating this like a minor algorithm update are going to be in a bad spot by Q4,” said Malhotra. “This is a structural change to how Google monetizes informational queries. You have to rebuild your acquisition math around it.”
With peak season planning for Q4 2026 already underway at most DTC operators, the window to restructure the acquisition model before holiday traffic becomes critical is shrinking fast.
