The changes tied to AI Mode and AI Overviews are radically redrawing SEO metrics and strategies: the only certainty? A drastic drop in organic traffic
Welcome to the fourth episode of SEO Confidential, the column where I interview industry insiders, colleagues and friends about the whole wide world of SEO.
The goal of these chats?
Simple, but ambitious.
To shed light and clear up doubts, uncertainties and fears about SEO, visibility and everything around them.
To explore the most disruptive developments and reflect on the impact they will have on websites.
And, above all, to give you alternative angles — genuinely different points of view — so we can decode the future of SEO together. A future that, with the hurricane of AI Mode and AI Overviews, promises to be… interesting. To put it mildly.
After chatting with Lily Ray in the last episode, today I have the pleasure of catching up with Elisa Paesante.
Elisa is Content Manager and Country Manager at SISTRIX for Italy. And not only that: she is the mind orchestrating the English, German and Italian content of both the website and the tool.
In other words: someone who knows how to make data talk and how to make it understood, always keeping an eye on international developments.
And Sistrix? It is an all-in-one SEO software that lets you dissect, monitor and improve the rankings of websites.
Oh, before I forget: on May 15, 2025 I attended the SISTRIX Digital Marketing Meetup in Milan. And take it from someone who goes through plenty of events: chapeau.
An atmosphere that calling “human-scale” almost feels like an understatement. Zero fluff, plenty of substance, and that rare opportunity to talk with fellow SEOs without filters, without lecterns — just pure passion and sharing.
But enough chit-chat, let’s get to the point. AI is rewriting the rules of the game, Google seems to be playing hide-and-seek with our nerves, and you, quite rightly, are wondering: “So what on earth do I do with my site now?”.
Well, I put these (and other) questions to Elisa. Let’s hear what she had to say.
According to Sistrix’s Content Manager, “AI Mode demands new tracking metrics (and Google knows it well)”
Let’s start with the SISTRIX Meetup held on May 15, 2025 in Milan. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Attendees all talk about a unique, ‘human-scale’ atmosphere that fosters genuine sharing and the creation of a real community.
How would you describe this year’s experience? Did the event manage to keep this distinctive spirit and, at the same time, what were the most debated and significant topics or insights that emerged, especially regarding the impact of AI on SEO and challenges such as lead tracking?
Ever since the first edition of the SISTRIX Meetup in Italy, I have been pleasantly surprised by the attendees’ enthusiasm for being part of a community where they can share ideas and insights, but also worries and doubts.
The digital world has become a blender of novelties, and those who work in it every day often find themselves having to reinvent their strategies overnight.
What stood out most in the feedback I received is the gratitude for being able to talk face to face with experts (who normally speak from a stage and are considered unapproachable) and discover that they too share the same doubts and the same challenges.
Among the most debated topics, AI naturally stands out along with all the related developments (from AI Overviews to Chatbots), but so do topics tied to the “everyday” side of SEO, such as building SEO audits and measuring KPIs.
In October we will hold the fourth edition: it will be interesting to see which topics emerge and which new challenges we will find ourselves facing.
After Google I/O, Mountain View almost seems to be whispering in our ear that AI Mode will not be invasive, that clicks from AI Overviews will be ‘more valuable’ and that, in short, we should stop obsessing over sheer traffic volume.
Google is elegantly preparing us for a future with less organic traffic, perhaps consoling us with the alleged ‘higher quality’ of the clicks it will still grant us. I realize this is a million-dollar question: will Google ever decide to transparently provide performance data specific to these AI Overviews directly in Search Console, allowing us to measure their real impact?
The shift to AI Overviews and Chatbots involves a fundamental change in how information is presented and sources are cited. The drastic reduction in direct links and the growing importance of pure mentions support the hypothesis that Google is preparing the ecosystem for a future in which visibility and impact metrics go beyond the mere volume of organic clicks.
Considering how AI Overviews and Chatbots interact with web content, the need for new metrics (or for a different interpretation of the existing ones) becomes critical.
Google has recently confirmed that an AI Mode report will soon be available in Search Console. So hopefully that is a good sign for AI Overview-related KPIs.
The antitrust trial is revealing an almost… ‘artisanal’ Google, with ‘handcrafted’ ranking signals built for sacrosanct traceability — a need that, ironically, we SEOs have been invoking for years when it comes to its algorithms. Now, while Google reassures us that the recent leak is ‘insufficient’ to reveal its secrets, it candidly admits that the forced sharing of click and query data would allow reverse engineering. Could it be that the ranking mechanism is less ‘magical’ and more… ‘controllable’ than the official story suggests?
The points that emerged from the antitrust trial statements do indeed suggest that Google’s ranking mechanism, in its core components, is designed with a very precise logic and a strong emphasis on understanding and control (traceability) by its developers. It is not a completely self-generated or inscrutable system, as a “magical” black box might lead you to think.
The developers’ need for traceability is, in a sense, the internal echo of the very same need for understanding that SEOs invoke from the outside.
Doesn’t Google’s AI Mode, by providing direct answers, risk draining the traffic (and therefore the revenue) of the websites that painstakingly create that content, to the benefit of Google itself?
Doesn’t Google’s approach to AI Mode, which effectively forces publishers to hand over their content or be excluded from search, risk undermining the economic sustainability of those who produce original information, almost exclusively to the platform’s advantage?
Google is communicating that user needs are changing and that the search engine is adapting accordingly, preparing webmasters to expect fewer visits from “classic” search. While claiming that clicks coming from AI Overviews have a “higher value”, the signal is clear: the overall volume of direct traffic expected from Google search is set to decline.
More generally, the issue of content originality was already complex and hotly debated in the past: sites that copied text from other sites could (and still can) rank in the SERPs, in some cases better than the original ones. AI Mode can only raise further concerns on this point: clearer and more binding rules at the European level will probably be needed to safeguard publishers’ business models.
In the era of AI Mode and AIOs, how can tools like Sistrix be useful? What changes for SISTRIX and what new features have you planned to face such disruptive changes?
SISTRIX’s mission is to make web platforms as transparent as possible, so that companies of any size can take advantage of these platforms in the best possible way.
That is precisely why we are evaluating not only an expansion of the “classic” tool to address the new types of results appearing in the SERPs (such as AI Overviews), but also the creation of a tool specifically dedicated to AI Chatbots.
This will make it possible to analyze the brands and sources most used by LLMs to answer users’ questions, identify the most requested topics, discover which entities (people, places, objects, etc.) a given Chatbot associates with a specific brand, and much more.
The tool is currently in beta and will soon be made available to the public.
Only with reliable, high-quality data at hand can you make informed, long-term decisions. Providing that data has always been SISTRIX’s goal.
Search Console and AI Mode: when the data is there… but you can’t (yet) use it!
So what do we take home from this stimulating chat with Elisa Paesante?
First: the era of organic traffic is on its last legs. Period. There is no point beating around the bush.
Second: content quality, originality, and that almost mythological ability to become an authoritative source for artificial intelligences will be our daily bread.
In short, being there is no longer enough — you have to carry weight, to have an impact.
Third: data, ladies and gentlemen, data! Elisa stressed it, and I will say it again. Without numbers, without metrics, you risk groping in the dark.
Is Google taking action?
Good, about time!
But you know what the less good news is?
That AI Mode performance data will indeed arrive in Search Console.
But we won’t be able to isolate it!
Basically we will get a nice minestrone: an aggregated figure tossed into the “Web search” cauldron, without the slightest chance of doing a breakout, of truly understanding what comes from AI Mode and what comes from the good old web.
It is as if they told you:
“Here is the sales report, but everything is in there: apples, pears, bolts and broken dreams. Good luck figuring out what sold best!”.
In short, for the purposes of any serious, surgical analysis, it is a figure worth about as much as a losing card when the game is already over.
In her interview, Elisa hoped that the arrival of the AI Mode report would be a “good sign for KPIs”. Well, the sign is there, but it risks sounding like:
“We’ll give you something so you stop complaining, but not enough for you to really understand”.
The feeling — forgive my bluntness — is that Big G is handing us a broken compass before sending us into the jungle.
SEO has become a much, much more sophisticated magic trick, where the ball is almost invisible.
And here we are, magnifying glass in hand, with a good dose of constructive skepticism and the firm intention of figuring out where the trick is.
See you in the next episode of SEO Confidential! And remember: no panic, but keep your eyes wide open. The fog is thick, visibility is far from great, but let’s hold the course!
#fullsteamahead
