Whether you have worked on your SEO for years or enjoyed free traffic, 2025 has seen a big drop in organic traffic. Of course the opposite to the elephant in the room (because everyone has been talking about it) is AI.
The introduction of AI overview to search has wiped both impressions and clicks across industries. However for non publisher websites, AI overview shouldn’t have had an impact on a businesses bottom line. If you’ve noticed a drop in organic traffic, but not in commercial outcomes from organic traffic, happy days.
However if you’re seeing both a decline in organic traffic and a decline in revenue/leads from organic traffic there’s probably a bigger issue at play.
The highest converting kind of organic traffic is branded, e.g. a user is searching for your business name. A decline in branded organic traffic is a bigger issue to diagnose. There are a few tools that can help you in this endeavor. SEMrush has a quick brand vs non brand breakdown in the domain overview widget.
To get the best data jump into Google Search Console filter your brand name and see if you can see a trend in clicks.
The above screenshot shows the total clicks are improving, though if we dig a little deeper and filter to only show branded terms are in decline.
Lastly, if your brand is big enough Google Trends is a great place to see if there has been a decline.
What to do if your branded traffic is in decline? Short term look to something that will get your brand directly in front of your audience, think PR, Meta Ads or out of home. Long term prepare a strategy for SEO to support your brand’s growth with longer tail keywords and upper funnel content.
The next thing to look at is pretty simple, you could be on page 1 for a less diverse spread of keywords as you once were.
To check this use SEMrush’s domain overview tool, look at all time keywords and filter to “top 3” and “4-10”. If those two lines are in decline it shows that over time the number of keywords you’ve had on page 1 has reduced. In this scenario you can either go after what’s been lost or try to find new/less competitive keyword opportunities.
Use one of the many tools that can give you historical keyword ranking data, search console is the best. Export a list of all keywords and compare the average position to find the ones you’ve lost.
There are quite a few reasons that you would see a decline in visibility. Though neglecting SEO is the usual suspect.
A very common cause is a botched migration after launching a new site. This is a painful one as usually once the damage has been done it’s difficult to recover. Integrating your SEO during the build process is the smoothest way to minimise the risk of lost organic traffic. There’s a range of checks however ensuring you have redirects in place is key. This means Google doesn’t have to start from scratch with your new pages, rather picks up where it left off.
Then again, you might have been lazy with your SEO. When you’re at the top there’s only one way to go. Over time your rankings will begin to decay, and there will always be a competitor out there working hard to nudge you off top spot.
Maybe Google has had an algorithm update and your content and links no longer align with best practice.
Whatever the reason, the best outcome is to develop and stick to a strong SEO strategy.
If you haven’t lost visibility it could be Google Ads taking your clicks.
In a shock to absolutely no one we need to remember that Google is a company. They make their money from advertising. So, they will try to give their advertising as much real estate as possible, without jeopardising their main function of answering queries.
For years Google has been pushing broad match keywords for better Google Ads results. This means if you once enjoyed the free traffic for a keyword in position 1 such as “service + location”, it’s advantageous for Google to show an ad higher from another business who has “similar service + nearby location”. Unfortunately, the only solution here is to start competing with Google Ads as well. If it’s not Google getting paid for clicks you used to get for free then it could be an issue with the market.
As mentioned above, Google’s primary function is to answer people’s questions. When there is a lack of variety for Google to pull results from quite often you can list one site multiple times in the SERP. If you search for pizza restaurants near me and all that appeared was Dominos, you’d rightfully be upset, you want options. If there has been a newcomer to the market Google will quickly list them as an option as well.
Addressing an increase in competition is solved by widening the net for potential search traffic. SEO fundamentals by finding keywords that have search volume and are relevant to your niche that your competitors aren’t ranking for.
Whether you need help diagnosing the traffic drop, or need help implementing the solution. Get in touch with us, we live for this stuff.
