You check Google Analytics and something looks off.
Your rankings are mostly the same. You haven’t changed anything on the website. No penalties, no technical issues. But the traffic numbers are quietly, steadily lower than they were 12 months ago.
If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Business owners and marketers across Malaysia are seeing the same thing — and most of them are looking in the wrong place for the cause.
The answer isn’t on your website. It’s what’s happening above it.
What Changed on Google
For years, ranking on the first page of Google meant traffic. Someone searched, they saw your link, they clicked.
That relationship has been quietly breaking down.
Google has been adding more and more features above the organic results — the blue links you worked hard to rank for. Today, before a user even reaches your website link, they have to scroll past:
- Google AI Overviews — AI-generated summaries that directly answer the search query
- Paid ads — up to four at the top of the page
- Featured snippets — a single highlighted answer box
- People Also Ask — an expandable section of related questions with inline answers
- Google Maps / Local Pack — three local business results with ratings and hours
- Shopping results — product images and prices for commercial queries
By the time a user reaches the organic results, many of them have already found what they were looking for. They got their answer from the AI Overview. They clicked a map result. They saw an ad.
This is called zero-click search — queries that get answered on Google without the user ever clicking through to a website. Research from SparkToro and other industry analysts found that more than half of all Google searches now end without a single click to any website — a trend that has accelerated with the introduction of AI Overviews.
You can rank number one on Google and still get significantly less traffic than the same position gave you three years ago.
AI Overviews: The Biggest Shift
Of all the changes, Google AI Overviews has had the most immediate impact on organic traffic.
When AI Overviews appear — and they’re showing up for an increasing share of searches in Malaysia — they sit at the very top of the page, above everything else. They give a complete, direct answer. For many users, that’s enough. They don’t need to click.
The categories most affected are exactly the ones where Malaysian businesses invest most in SEO:
- Informational searches — “how to register a company in Malaysia,” “what is stamp duty,” “symptoms of dengue fever”
- Comparison searches — “best accounting software for SME Malaysia,” “types of home loans in Malaysia”
- Local service searches — “dental clinic near me,” “best lawyer in KL” — where the Local Pack now competes with AI answers
If your traffic strategy relied on ranking for informational keywords to bring people into your funnel — that funnel has a hole in it now.
It’s Not Just Google
While Google’s changes have had the most immediate impact on existing traffic, the longer-term story is about where searches are happening at all.
A growing segment of Malaysians — particularly those aged 18–40 — have started using AI tools as their primary way to find information and discover businesses. They’re not using Google less because they’ve noticed AI Overviews. They’re using ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google Gemini directly for many of the searches that used to go to Google.
“Best physiotherapist in Damansara” used to mean a Google search. For a growing number of people, it now means a direct question to an AI tool. The result is the same — someone is looking for a business recommendation — but the channel has changed entirely.
Your Google Analytics doesn’t show you these people at all. They’re not in your traffic data. They went to an AI tool, got a recommendation, and called whichever business was recommended. If that wasn’t you, you lost a customer you never knew was looking.
The Compounding Problem
Here’s what makes this particularly difficult.
Traffic decline from AI Overviews is gradual. It doesn’t trigger an alarm in Google Analytics. There’s no penalty notification, no sudden drop that demands attention. It just slowly, quietly gets smaller — easy to attribute to seasonality, to a competitor getting stronger, to something else.
By the time the cumulative decline is obvious, months of momentum have been lost.
And the businesses that are growing during this period? They’re the ones who understood the shift early and adapted. They’re showing up in AI recommendations. They’re capturing the customers who used to click your Google result but now get their answer from ChatGPT instead.
The gap compounds. The longer you wait, the more ground you’re giving up.
What Doesn’t Fix This
Before getting to what works, it’s worth being clear about what won’t help.
More SEO — if your traffic is dropping because of AI Overviews and zero-click search, traditional SEO optimisation won’t reverse it. You can’t SEO your way out of a structural platform shift.
More content — publishing more blog posts targeting Google keywords will have diminishing returns if those keywords are increasingly answered by AI before anyone reaches your site.
A website redesign — better UX, faster load times, a prettier homepage. None of this addresses the source of the problem.
Google Ads — paid search can supplement your traffic, but at increasing cost, and it doesn’t address the AI channel at all.
The fix is not doing more of what worked in 2019. The fix is adapting to how customers are actually searching in 2025.
What Actually Helps
The businesses maintaining and growing their online visibility in 2025 are doing a few things differently.
They’re optimising for AI, not just Google.
This means making their website content citable — written in clear, specific, question-answering language that AI tools can quote and reference. Not keyword-stuffed pages, but genuinely useful answers to the questions their customers ask.
They’re building presence outside their own website.
AI tools don’t just read your website. They draw on the entire web — directories, reviews, media mentions, social platforms, industry associations. Businesses that show up consistently across multiple credible sources get recommended. Businesses that exist only on their own domain don’t.
They’re fixing their structured data.
Schema markup — code that tells AI systems exactly who you are, where you operate, and what you do — is one of the most direct signals available. Most Malaysian business websites don’t have it. The ones that do are ahead.
They’re ensuring AI crawlers can access their site.
Some websites inadvertently block AI crawlers through their robots.txt settings. If your website is blocking GPTBot, ClaudeBot, or PerplexityBot, you’re invisible to those systems by design. This is a quick fix once you know about it.
This set of practices has a name: Generative Engine Optimisation — GEO. It’s the discipline of making your business visible to AI-powered search, the same way SEO made you visible to Google. SeenBy Digital specialises in exactly this for Malaysian businesses — auditing your current AI visibility and closing the gaps before your competitors do.
The Honest Prognosis
Website traffic from Google is not going to zero. Google search isn’t dying. But the traffic-per-ranking-position relationship that the last decade of SEO was built on has permanently weakened, and it will continue to weaken as AI search matures.
The businesses that adapt early will maintain their lead. The businesses that keep doing what worked in 2020 will find their numbers slowly, steadily declining — with no obvious reason in their analytics to explain why.
If your traffic is already dropping, you’re seeing the early signal of a larger shift. The question is whether you treat it as a mystery to explain or an opportunity to move on.
Curious what your business looks like from an AI search perspective? Get your free GEO score from SeenBy Digital →