While AI Overviews and LLMs may be eating top-of-funnel search, they’re quietly boosting traffic where it counts most: your homepage.
Here’s what we found from analyzing 50 sites — and why it might be good news for your brand.
Rapid Change Quarter-Over-Quarter
Undoubtedly, the recent three month period has accelerated the rollout of AI Overviews in most industries, and because of that, there has been a decrease in clicks. On the positive side, there has also been a sizable increase in impressions.
Meanwhile, LLM adoption has continued at a rapid pace.
As Kevin Indig shared, it’s not uncommon for search traffic to look like this:
We saw a similar trend in our data, with high growth/enterprise clients across SaaS, fintech and consumer industries.
This said, something started becoming apparent because of this change – the value of impressions.
If you can show up on bottom funnel, product-focused searches, how can that not have value that pays itself back in brand recall and eventual conversions?
As an example, Mailchimp shows up in the AI Overview for “best email marketing software”.
This may not immediately drive a click, but it’s hard to argue this doesn’t drive value to Mailchimp as users are deep in their consideration phase.
Seemingly, this should contribute to an increase in branded search.. right?
Similarly, when we do this same search on popular LLMs, Mailchimp is frequently cited – but not linked directly. What should this result in?
More branded search.
Analysing Our Data
To test this hypothesis, we aggregated search console data from 50 national websites – 28 in B2B and 22 in B2C – we’ve worked over 12+ years that had accumulated in our Search Console.
We compared sitewide traffic to homepage traffic for the last three months (starting May 19th, 2025) compared to the previous three months, with the thought process of capturing this recent period that has shown accelerated AI Overview and LLM change.
This was the outcome:
As you can see, there is a notable increase in impressions and clicks to the homepage, despite a decrease in sitewide traffic.
While LLM + AIO causality is impossible to prove in aggregate, the consistent pattern across brands suggests a meaningful signal.
In B2C where there is likely less AI adoption from an LLM perspective year-to-date, overall homepage click increases are not as significant.
This said, total click impact is actually higher than B2B sitewide. In B2C, AI Overviews are hypothetically more likely to steal clicks due to less complex queries on average.
It’s feasible this tension is playing out in the overall data.
However, it’s worth noting that in B2C, late Q4 was captured in the sample which most know is peak in e-commerce industries. This said, only six of the 22 websites could be characterized as having holiday audiences.
On the B2B side, the picture looks rosier.
There is a significant homepage increase, and overall click impact is less significant. Like a reverse B2C, it’s worth noting that the holidays are often slower times for B2B companies, although for many not in a significant way.
Example Data for Siege Media
To show you an example of this in action, we can look at Siege Media’s data.
While traffic has never been our north star, our traffic is down in the last three months even though impressions are up significantly.
Notably, our SEO strategy emphasis has also decreased for reasons independent of AI change.
On the LLM side, we have great visibility across queries. According to LLM visibility tracking tool Profound, we have the best visibility across all competitors on LLMs:
So, we have great visibility on a platform likely to drive branded search, and impressions are up 17% sitewide on Google.
Homepage traffic should be up significantly and sure enough, the data confirms it:
Homepage clicks are up 29.6%. Nearly thirty percent!
Notably, there has been no impact on pipeline QOQ, and the number of leads citing “research” in the last three months as to how they found us has skyrocketed.
“So What, Traffic is Still Down!”
It’s possible this is your response to the above data.
But when we think about it deeper, the picture is a lot rosier.
As we all know, homepage traffic converts significantly better than sitewide traffic.
LLMs are taking top funnel traffic from us, but seem to be sending us more bottom funnel (to the right places). This is a positive and should be weighed accordingly.
When I went to AI to estimate the conversion differences across our sample set, the conversion rate expectation I was given was ~3-8% for the homepage, and 1-4% sitewide.
While it’s an impossible exercise to compile everything and guess how all this nets out, we can at least provide an example scenario.
Here’s an aggregate of ~32 websites that netted out to approximately 20% of their traffic going to the homepage.
In short, if your homepage has historically generated 20% or more of your site traffic *and* you have a solid SEO strategy, there’s a good chance you are positive from a conversion perspective QOQ even with a reasonable decline in sitewide traffic.
Turns out, the sky isn’t falling – it’s shifting.
A Few Additional Observations
A few other observations stood out when looking at the companies that won or lost in regards to this change on the micro level:
If you didn’t get much homepage traffic previously, you still won’t get homepage traffic.
That is, if you weren’t a brand, this change hasn’t suddenly made you one.
So for non-brands still with a significant amount of non-branded traffic, the change to AIOs and LLMs is probably hurting more significantly.
For real brands, it has a chance of actually being a positive thus far, further amplifying what was already there.
The impact was more pronounced for AI-first companies or those with an LLM strategy such as Siege.
Not surprisingly, AI users search for AI tools on LLMs with higher frequency, so this trend plays out a little more dramatically.
However, a few of these tools were also noisy due to the rapidly evolving search volume changes playing out industry by industry.
Forward-Thinking Recommendations
To capitalize on this emerging pattern, a few strategies stand out:
- Further improve your homepage. The homepage was always a critical page, but the importance may have further gone up as the % of traffic is expected to continue to increase.
- The value of personalized targeting and branded landing pages will increase. With more people searching your brand name, both defending the term and driving users to the ideal pages when they search will increase.
- Retarget your homepage audience. If not already doing this, increased audience shows the importance of doing so.
- Optimize for homepage CTR. Our data showed homepage impressions often went up 50%, but clicks only went up 8%. That widening gap is an opportunity.
- Optimize for LLMs/AIOs. As noted in our data, you will only capitalize on this shift if you are a brand and are seeing strong visibility on LLMs (which are often linked). And while it’s not like comparing French to English, there are differences in approach.
- Invest in brand. It’s the new “create great content”, but regardless must be said. Those who have already been doing this are fairing positively, those that aren’t are fairing worse. And so it goes.
Communicate Changes in Expectation
Most importantly for the SEO industry, this change requires communication.
There are likely many executives fretting about the change in their traffic.
This data shows it’s actually not that bad, and may even be positive due to the shift to higher converting pages for some companies.
We should start highlighting the positive changes in our homepage traffic/net overall conversions, cite articles like this to highlight the shift, and from there slowly help executives realize the world is not ending as things normalize.
Want to understand how your homepage is performing in the age of AI?
Siege Media can help you benchmark it—and build strategies that drive net-new conversions even in a zero-click world. Contact us today.
