We Ranked #1 on Google. Our Client's Traffic Dropped 59%.

This is not a hypothetical. This is data from a real client, in a real market, in 2026.

The site held position #1 for a target keyword. It had been there for 11 months. Ranking was stable. We had done everything right: technical SEO, content depth, backlinks, Core Web Vitals.

Then Google rolled out AI Overviews broadly in the US.

The ranking did not change. The traffic dropped by 59% on that query.