While many sites did shovel slop out the door in the name of SEO, the decline in Google search traffic is happening to all sites.

It’s a real phenomenon where search impressions and clicks, which moved roughly in tandem for many years, have started diverging rather abruptly and dramatically. It is an obvious qualitative change in Google search traffic.

Everyone is blaming the AI overviews, and they seem like the most obvious culprit. But regardless, the change in pattern is real and not correlated with site content quality.