AI-generated answers are reshaping online visibility as traffic to cafes, pubs, and hotels declines sharply
Oct 20, 2025
Google’s rollout of AI Overviews and AI Mode has transformed how people search online — and hospitality businesses are among the biggest losers. New research shows that as AI delivers answers directly on the results page, fewer users are clicking through to websites, slowing or even reversing traffic growth across most industries.
Key takeaways
- Hospitality decline: The hospitality sector saw a –6.7% drop in monthly organic traffic — the steepest fall of any industry — compared to +47.9% growth the year before, a swing of 54.6 percentage points.
- Widespread slowdown: Average organic traffic growth across all sectors fell from 26.3% to 3.7% year-on-year after AI search was introduced, indicating a 22.6-point slowdown overall.
- Other sectors hit: Fashion (-3.4%), travel (-1.6%), finance (-1.4%), and manufacturing (-3.8%) also reported notable declines in web traffic following the shift to AI search.
- Ranking losses: Across industries, ranking pages fell by 11.1% on average, reversing 14.1% growth the year before — meaning fewer opportunities for visibility in search results.
- Least affected industries: IT, charity/NFP, healthcare, aviation, and education saw the smallest impact, suggesting that intent-driven or trust-based searches still prompt users to click through.
- Rise of zero-click behaviour: Nearly 60% of searches now end without a click as users find what they need directly in Google’s AI-generated summaries.
- New optimisation era: Experts urge brands to adopt generative engine optimisation (GEO) — creating comprehensive, trustworthy, human-focused content and building brand mentions and reviews to remain visible in AI search results.
- Quality over volume: AI systems increasingly favour authoritative and intent-matching content over sheer page quantity, pushing businesses to focus on depth and trustworthiness rather than scale.
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