The New Must Watch Metric for When Your Traffic Drops...

With the launch of Google AI creating Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) to provide your Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) results in a world of Zero-Click Results—yes that is a whole bunch of new acronyms—but it’s extremely important to under what are they and how to measure a new metric for website success when essentially you website visits will drop. 

Yes, your website traffic maybe or is dropping, but that doesn’t mean your website content isn’t successful. There are still some Top Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for GEO and AEO.  However before I go into how to determine this, let's run through the why of how we got here in chronological order. 

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) first began emerging in the mid-2010s, driven by the rise of schema markup and structured website design. The goal was simple: help search engines understand content well enough to provide direct answers to user queries.

By 2024, AEO was no longer a niche tactic—it had become a core pillar of digital marketing strategy. With the rapid adoption of AI-powered search, businesses realized that optimizing content to appear as the answer itself, rather than just a clickable link, was critical to staying visible.

Zero-Click Search Results

The concept of zero-click searches started gaining traction around 2019. These are search results that display the answer directly on the search engine results page (SERP), eliminating the need for users to click through to a website.

While frustrating to many publishers who lost traffic, zero-click results shaped the next phase of optimization strategies. Brands began adapting to zero-click optimization, focusing less on clicks and more on visibility and authority in the SERP itself.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)

A new frontier appeared in late 2024 with the rise of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). Early mentions surfaced in research papers and blog posts mid-2024, but by 2025, the practice had gained widespread recognition.

Unlike SEO, which focuses on ranking pages, or AEO, which ensures answers are easily extractable, GEO is about training content for AI itself. The goal is to ensure that generative AI systems—whether summarizing, answering, or creating overviews—use your content as a trusted source.

Google AI

The biggest shift came on May 20, 2025, when Google officially rolled out AI Mode in Search to all U.S. users. This marked the mainstream arrival of AI-first search experiences.

Google AI isn’t just one product—it’s an umbrella of initiatives, spanning research in natural language processing, computer vision, and machine learning, along with practical tools like Google Translate, Google Photos, and now, AI-powered Search.

With this shift, the line between search results and AI answers blurred completely, cementing GEO as the next essential evolution for marketers.

So you can see this was the path of search results for more than a decade, now supercharged within a year timespan by the emergence of AI and hence the dramatic drop for some web publisher sites as recently reported by SEJ, Google CTRs Drop 32% For Top Result After AI Overview Rollout. So as we are all scrambling to figure out how we can measure success and the tougher question of how to we convert users that are not coming to our website. 

The New Key Metric for Tracking AEO Results

First, start measuring your page impressions in Google Console. This can also be seen in your Google Analytics 4 Account, but I prefer creating a custom report in Looker Studio (Formerly, Google Data Studio) to see both. My example below is the humble beginnings of my newly launched 1 month old portfolio website in a pretty custom reporting format that’s easy to digest.

We can’t measure by Click Through Rate alone if you have seen a drop, but some good news Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and appear in Google search results, such as featured snippets or AI overviews, do count as impressions. Source

There are also tools to track your website's AI citations to monitor its performance in AI search  like Semrush AI Overview to measure the volume of Google AI overview citing your content. Also recently, Search Engine Journal reported, “Ahrefs Launches Tracker Comparing ChatGPT & Google Referral Traffic,” which is still developing and it’s based on limited cohorts of ahrefs users, but it is a starting place.

Another manual tactic that has been recommended is “Test prompt visibility Type a key user question into ChatGPT or another AI tool,” is a great tip from this really comprehensive GEO eBook from SEMJI.

So, at the end of the day, don’t panic if your site traffic drops. Instead—in the words of Ross Geller—“PIVOT!” Start closely tracking your website’s search impressions, experiment with emerging tools, and keep reading blogs like this one to stay ahead of rapidly evolving technology, because it’s not slowing down anytime soon.