Google AI Overviews Are Taking Clicks: What Mumbai Businesses Should Do in 2026

Here is a situation I now see every month. A chartered accountant in Thane opens Google Search Console and finds that his blog post on GST registration is shown more often than ever, yet the clicks to it have roughly halved over a year. Nobody has outranked him. Google has simply started answering the question itself, in an AI summary at the top of the page, and many people read that and move on.

That summary is an AI Overview. The question for a business owner in Mumbai, Navi Mumbai or Thane is practical: how much traffic is really at risk, for which kinds of searches, and what should you change? This piece goes through the best public data I could find, says clearly where it comes from (most of it is US data), and ends with what I am advising clients to do.

1. What AI Overviews and AI Mode are, and how they reached India

An AI Overview is a short AI-written answer that Google places above the normal results for some searches, with links to a few of the pages it drew on. AI Mode is a separate, chat-style tab in Google Search where you can ask longer questions and follow-ups. Google’s documentation on AI features and your website says both may use “query fan-out”, which means Google runs several related searches across subtopics in the background and assembles one answer from them.

India got these features early. AI Overviews arrived here in August 2024 in English and Hindi, as reported by All India Radio’s news service. At the time, Google’s Hema Budaraju said Indian users listen to AI Overview responses more often than users in other countries. AI Mode came to India in 2025, and in October 2025 Google added seven Indian languages to it, including Marathi, according to TechCrunch, which also quoted Google describing India as its largest user base for voice and visual search globally.

Sources: NewsOnAir, 15 August 2024; TechCrunch, 8 October 2025.

The language point matters for Mumbai. A customer can now ask Google a question in Marathi or Hindi, by voice, and get an AI answer drawn from pages in several languages. If your website only says what you do in vague English marketing lines, there is very little for that answer to pick up.

2. How often AI Overviews actually appear

You will see very confident numbers quoted for this, often “half of all searches”. I could not trace that figure to a study I could check, so I have not used it. The studies I could verify give a more useful answer: it depends on what people are searching for, and the share moves from month to month.

Sources: Pew Research Center, 22 July 2025; Semrush AI Overviews study, updated 15 December 2025; Whitespark, 12 May 2025. All US or unstated region; no comparable Indian study found.

Two things in that table shape my advice. First, longer, question-style searches trigger AI answers far more often. Pew found summaries on 53% of searches of ten words or more, against 8% for one- or two-word searches. Second, the Whitespark result is the closest thing we have to a study of local businesses, and it shows a sharp split. When someone asks a question, the AI answers. When someone wants a provider nearby, Google still mostly shows the map and the businesses.

Semrush also found the mix is changing. In January 2025, 91.3% of keywords that triggered an AI Overview were informational; by October that was down to 57.1%, with commercial, transactional and navigational searches making up a growing share. So “AI only touches blog questions” is less true than it was a year ago.

3. What AI Overviews do to clicks

This is where the independent data is most consistent. Every serious study I found reports fewer clicks to websites when an AI Overview is shown. They measure different things, so the numbers differ, but the direction does not.

Sources: Pew; Ahrefs, 4 February 2026; Seer Interactive, September 2025, reported by Search Engine Land. US and global data; correlation, not proof of cause.

A few details are worth knowing before you repeat these numbers. Ahrefs’ figure rose from 34.5% in its April 2025 study to 58% in the February 2026 update, and it rests on a forecast of what clicks would have been without AI Overviews. Seer’s researchers say openly that they cannot prove being cited causes the extra clicks; stronger brands may simply be cited more often. And Pew found that people ended their browsing session on 26% of pages with an AI summary, against 16% without one.

Google disagrees with the overall picture. In an August 2025 post, Google’s head of Search, Liz Reid, wrote that “total organic click volume from Google Search to websites has been relatively stable year-over-year” and that average click quality has increased. The post gives no figures to check. My reading: both can be true at once. Total clicks across the whole web may be stable while particular kinds of pages, especially simple question-and-answer content, lose a lot.

Note the Seer finding on paid clicks too. If you run Google Ads on question-style keywords, AI Overviews can cut the click-through rate on your ads as well.

See also: if you advertise on Google, how to advertise on Google explains how to keep ad spend on searches where people are ready to act.

4. Which Mumbai businesses are exposed, and which are not

Put the prevalence data and the click data together and a pattern appears. The table below is my own judgement, built on the Whitespark and Semrush findings, applied to the kinds of businesses I work with. Treat it as a starting point for your own Search Console check, not as measured Indian data.

My assessment, based on Whitespark and Semrush US findings. Not measured Indian data.

This is why a dental clinic in Nerul that gets most enquiries through Google Maps may barely notice AI Overviews, while a coaching institute that built its traffic on “how to prepare for” articles may have lost a large share of its visitors. The second business has not done anything wrong. The kind of traffic it relied on has become less clickable.

There is a second-order effect for question-heavy sites. Those informational visitors were often early-stage customers who later came back to buy. If they now get their answer from Google, you need another way to be remembered: being the source the AI cites, being visible when they move to a provider search, or both.

5. What Google says it takes to be cited

Google’s AI features documentation is short and blunt. To be shown as a supporting link, “a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet.” It then says: “There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary.”

The same page says you do not need new machine-readable files, “AI text files” or special markup. That is worth knowing because a lot of people are now selling llms.txt files and “AI schema” as the way into AI Overviews. Google’s own guidance points back to the basics instead:

• Let Googlebot crawl the page in robots.txt and make sure the page is actually indexed.
• Link to important pages from elsewhere on your site so Google can find them.
• Keep the important content in text, not only inside images or PDFs.
• Use structured data only where it matches what is visible on the page.
• Give people a good page experience, especially on mobile.

If you want to keep content out of AI Overviews, the controls are the normal snippet controls: nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet and noindex. Google notes these limit how your page appears in ordinary results too, so I rarely recommend them for a small business. Being quoted, even with fewer clicks, usually beats being absent.

Google also says clicks from AI features are counted in Search Console’s Performance report under the normal “Web” search type. There is no separate AI Overviews report, so you cannot see AI clicks on their own. Anyone showing you an exact “AI Overview traffic” number from Search Console is estimating.

6. Write pages an AI answer can quote

Google says there is no special formula, and I agree. In my experience, though, pages that get cited share a few habits that are simply good writing for busy readers. They answer the question in the first two or three sentences. They give specific facts rather than general claims. And they say who wrote them and why that person knows.

Answer first, then explain

If your page is called “How long does GST registration take?”, the first paragraph should give the answer and the conditions, then the details. Many Indian business blogs start with three paragraphs about the importance of GST. An AI system, and a human reader, has to dig for the useful sentence.

Add what only you know

An AI Overview can summarise the general rules from a dozen sites. What it cannot invent is your first-hand detail: the documents your clients usually forget, the questions patients ask after a procedure, the typical timelines you see in Navi Mumbai housing societies. Facts like these give a page a reason to be cited rather than paraphrased.

Be careful with AI-written pages

Google’s guidance on generative AI content allows AI help with research and structure, but warns that producing many pages “without adding value for users” may break its spam policies, and that “generative models don’t retrieve facts”. It asks you to fact-check everything before publishing, including titles and descriptions. A site full of AI-rewritten articles is competing with the AI Overview on its own ground, and it will lose.

7. Own the searches where people act

The Whitespark study found a local map pack on 93% of plain local-intent searches, and AI Overviews on only 15% of them. For most Mumbai businesses that is the clearest instruction in this whole article: the searches that bring calls, WhatsApp messages and walk-ins are still decided largely by your Google Business Profile and your service pages.

• Make the Business Profile complete and accurate: correct primary category, real name, hours, phone, service areas and photos.
• Build a steady flow of genuine reviews and reply to them. Reviews are also material AI answers draw on when people ask which business to choose.
• Have one clear page per core service, and per area if you genuinely serve it, with prices or price ranges where your trade allows, process, timelines and FAQs.
• Make it easy to act: tap-to-call, WhatsApp and directions on every service page.

See also: for the profile itself, follow the Google Business Profile field guide; for area pages and rankings across the nodes, read Local SEO in Navi Mumbai.

8. Measure what matters now

Traffic used to be a decent stand-in for results. With AI answers, a page can lose half its clicks and still bring in the same number of enquiries, because the people who do click are further along. Google itself argues clicks are now higher quality. I would not take that on trust, but it is a good reason to measure enquiries rather than visits.

• In Search Console, track impressions and clicks separately. Rising impressions with falling clicks signals AI answers; falling impressions signals a ranking problem.
• In Google Analytics, set up conversions for form submissions, WhatsApp clicks and tap-to-call, and judge pages by those.
• In your Business Profile performance report, track calls, direction requests and website clicks month by month.
• Ask new customers how they found you, and write it down. “Google told me about you” is now a real answer.

9. Where this advice breaks down

I want to be clear about the limits of the evidence, because a lot of what is written about AI search is stated with more certainty than it deserves.

• Almost all the data is from the US. I found no published Indian study on AI Overview prevalence or click loss. Indian search behaviour, with more voice, more mobile and more mixed-language queries, may differ.
• The studies show correlation. Ahrefs models a counterfactual; Seer cannot prove citation causes clicks. The direction is consistent, but exact percentages should not be treated as forecasts for your site.
• Google disputes the conclusion. Its claim that total clicks are stable is unverified, but so is the opposite claim for any single market.
• It changes fast. Semrush saw AI Overview rates rise from 6.49% to 24.61% of keywords between January and July 2025, then fall to 15.69% by November. Anything you read, including this, has a short shelf life.
• You cannot control citations. Doing everything right does not guarantee your page is linked. Small sites in crowded topics may rarely be cited at all.

None of this changes the core advice, because the core advice is ordinary good practice. It does mean you should be wary of anyone selling a guaranteed way into AI Overviews.

A short checklist

The Thane CA I mentioned at the start lost clicks on a question Google now answers for free. His provider searches, the ones where people ring him, held steady. That is where most Mumbai businesses should put their attention.