A North American e-commerce brand started the Content Desk in February 2025. That year, AI Overviews drained clicks from the industry’s biggest keywords. New content replaced the losses and kept going.
AI Overviews started answering commercial searches on the results page. Zero-click searches took over the head of the market.
The store’s single biggest keyword lost 63% of its clicks in twelve months. A second head term dropped 27%. Rankings weren’t the problem. The store already ranked. Searchers were getting their answer from the AI box and never reaching a website. Those clicks were drying up for every brand in the category.
Catalog pages couldn’t fix that on their own. The brand needed content that reached buyers earlier, while they measured their space, compared brands, and worked out what to order.
Every deliverable went into a dated work log: what changed, on which URL, on which day. The log holds 50 entries for the year.
Buyers in this category research practical questions first: dimensions, room setup, comfort, and how brands compare. I mapped clusters around those questions and planned each one before writing.
Eight of the new articles drew 13,300 clicks in their first year. Several settled at position 5 to 8. One comparison page now catches shoppers who search for a competitor by name.
A product page updated in February grew 128% for the year. A collection page updated in May grew 73%. One older buying guide went from 32 clicks to 288.
Each new piece links into its cluster and down to the catalog. The homepage climbed 7.5 positions over the year on the strength of the pages around it.
| Metric | Before | After 12 months | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Organic clicks (full year) | 35,323 | 48,721 | +37.9% |
| Impressions | 4.17M | 7.57M | +81.6% |
| Average position | 30.2 | 21.3 | +8.9 spots |
| Top branded query clicks | 3,924 | 5,573 | +42% |
| Reoptimized product page | 345 | 788 | +128% |
| Reoptimized collection page | 331 | 573 | +73% |
Eight months past the analyzed year, an independent SEO platform estimates the store’s organic traffic has grown another 121%.
The head terms never came back. The content out-earned them anyway.
The playbook holds for any site losing head-term clicks to Google’s AI Overviews. Reach buyers earlier in their research, own the brand comparisons, and let long-tail pages replace the zero-click losses.
How these numbers were measured. Click and impression figures come from Google Search Console for January 1 to December 31, 2025, compared against the prior year. The engagement began in February 2025. Ranking counts and post-period traffic estimates come from an independent SEO platform. The client’s name is withheld by agreement. I can walk through the raw data and the dated work log on a call.
The Content Desk ships senior-reviewed articles and reoptimizations every month, with a dated log of everything delivered.