Impressions flat,
clicks falling?

An AI Overview sits above the organic results and answers the question outright, citing a handful of sources in a side panel. The user reads the answer and, most of the time, stops. The measurable signature in Search Console is impressions holding steady while clicks fall and average position stays flat. Nothing is broken on your site: the query is simply being resolved before anyone reaches you.

Google builds the Overview from pages it already retrieved for the query, so classic SEO gets you to the door: crawlable, indexed, competitive for the term. Selection from that pool is where the AI-era signals decide. What we consistently see on the pages that get summarised: a direct answer near the top rather than after three scroll-lengths of hero, entity clarity through Organization schema so the source is attributable, FAQPage or Article markup matching the question form, a visible date, and facts with numbers attached. What we see on the pages that don't: interchangeable templated copy that Google has no reason to prefer over four near-identical competitors.

Not all lost clicks are equal. Definitional and how-to queries are the ones Overviews absorb hardest, and chasing them back is mostly wasted effort. Put the work into comparison, pricing, local-service and "best X for Y" pages. Those still return a click because the buyer wants to evaluate, not just to know, and an Overview citation on them puts you in the shortlist at exactly the right moment.

Position tracking can't tell you whether you're inside the Overview. We test the query the way a searcher phrases it, in the market you sell into, and record whether your brand is named and which domains were used to build the answer. Re-run it after you ship changes. Movement in that list is the only evidence that the restructuring worked.