AI Overviews Cut YMYL Traffic While B2B Tech Content Grows

Search Engine Land tracked organic traffic for 30 major publishers across nine industries, comparing August 2026 to August 2025 using Semrush's traffic estimates, to test whether top-of-funnel (TOFU) content still drives clicks as AI Overviews expand. Overall organic clicks are down 42% since AI Overviews began expanding in Google Search, per the outlet's own framing. The decline is not evenly spread.

Where TOFU traffic fell

• Every publisher analyzed in finance, healthcare, legal and consumer tech lost TOFU traffic year over year.

• Legalzoom.com's TOFU pages fell 90% year over year, the sharpest drop in the sample. Legalzoom attributed the loss entirely to changes in Google Search.

• These are Google's Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) categories, where AI Overviews appear most often and can answer a query without a click.

Where it grew

• Every publisher analyzed in cybersecurity and marketing/sales software gained TOFU traffic over the same period, and cloud infrastructure publishers were positive as a group.

• Middle-of-funnel content (comparison and "best" pages) tracked the same direction as TOFU within each industry, so industry mattered more than funnel stage.

The split lines up with a simple test: content earns a click when it does something an AI summary cannot. B2B buyers researching a security vendor or a platform migration go deeper than one Overview can satisfy, and their research often outpaces what a model's training data covers, per the analysis. A generic "what is X" glossary entry about a tax rate or a symptom lacks that advantage, and so does content written to read like one. The article backs this with a number from the same author's earlier Search Engine Land analysis: plain how-to content gets picked up in LLM citations only about 12% of the time. Ungated tools, like calculators and screeners, fared better, cited by name when AI summaries recommend a specific option.

The source does not give traffic or percentage figures for cybersecurity, marketing SaaS or cloud specifically, only that each grew. It also does not test whether the YMYL decline holds beyond the 30 largest publishers in its sample, though it notes that AI Overview citations in YMYL topics already concentrate on a small set of established domains.