How to check whether AI search is eating your traffic, using numbers you already have
The short answer
Do not judge this by one week of traffic. The signal is a widening gap between impressions and clicks in Search Console, a fall in non-brand clicks on pages that did not change, and a rise in "direct" or signed-in traffic at the same time. If impressions hold while clicks fall for six weeks, AI answers are absorbing the click, not your rankings falling.
Step 1: Look at impressions and clicks together
Open Search Console, Performance, and set the date range to the last three months with the previous period comparison on. Two lines matter: impressions and clicks. If impressions are flat or rising while clicks fall, your pages are still being seen. People are reading the answer on the results page instead of clicking through.
If impressions also fall, the problem is different. Something changed in ranking or indexing, and AI answers are not the first suspect.
Step 2: Split brand from non-brand
Filter queries to separate people searching for your name from people searching for a topic. Brand clicks are the ones that survive AI answers, because someone who already knows you is looking for you, not for an answer. If brand clicks are stable and non-brand clicks are down, that is the clearest single signal available for free.
Step 3: Find the pages losing the most clicks
Switch the table view to Pages and sort by click change. Then check each page against two questions: did the position stay roughly the same, and did the query mix stay roughly the same? A page that held its position while losing clicks is being answered inside Google.
Pages that lose position and clicks at once are usually a separate problem, like a competitor publishing something better, or a page that has aged out of a news cycle.
Step 4: Check what happened to the visit, not just the click
In Analytics, compare sessions from organic search against sessions from direct and email over the same period. If organic search falls and direct holds or rises, some of your audience has moved to a habit instead of a search. That is a better outcome than losing them entirely, and it is the number that tells you whether your newsletter or bookmark traffic is doing its job.
Step 5: Understand what the market is seeing
Reddit's own numbers this week are the clearest public example. Search referral traffic fell by more than a million referrals a week on average in October, and its chief executive said plainly that AI Mode does not drive traffic to anyone. A controlled study with 1,100 Google users in August found AI Mode cut outbound clicks by 18.8 percentage points, with news sites losing 12.5 and Reddit 21.2.
You are not imagining the trend, and you are not the only one measuring it. The useful question is what you do about it.
What actually helps
Own a channel. Email is the only distribution that does not change its rules on a Tuesday. If your best pages convert readers to a list, the next AI answer update costs you traffic but not the relationship.
Write pages that answer a question completely and then go one step further than the answer: a template, a table, a worked example, something the answer cannot reproduce. That is what still earns a click.
Keep your technical house in order so that when a click does happen, it lands well: fast load, clear title, no layout jump, and schema that tells a machine what the page is. Our note on restricted AI capability and the daily news hub are good places to see the format in practice.
What not to do
Do not block Google's crawler to punish AI answers. You lose the search traffic you still have and gain nothing, because the answers keep being generated from other sources. And do not chase AI traffic with tricks; the surfaces change faster than any tactic survives.
Questions people are asking
How do I know if AI answers are cutting my clicks?
Impressions stay flat or rise while clicks fall, position holds, and non-brand clicks drop more than brand clicks. That combination points to answers absorbing the click.
Is one bad month enough to tell?
No. Give it six weeks. Seasonality, a news cycle or a single viral post can move a month on its own.
Should I block AI crawlers?
Not Google's search crawler. Blocking it costs you the traffic you still get. If you want to limit training use, that is a separate decision with its own trade-offs.
What is the best defence?
An audience you can reach without search: email, an app, or a community. Everything else is rented.
Does this affect small sites more than big ones?
It hits anyone whose traffic depends on a query they do not own. Big publishers have brand searches; small sites usually do not, so the effect is sharper.