Traffic to a lot of small sites started sliding this year, and the shape of the slide is distinctive. Impressions in Search Console hold roughly steady. Clicks fall. Average position barely moves. Nothing is broken, nothing was penalized, and the usual checklist turns up nothing to fix.
That pattern means the answer is being read on the results page. An AI summary at the top states the thing your article says, cites three sources, and the reader never scrolls. You were not outranked. You were quoted.
There is no clean way to opt out of that and still be found, so the useful question is which pages lose and which do not.
Pages that lose are the ones answering a question with one correct answer. What size air fryer for two people. How many watt hours is a 20,000 mAh battery. What does SPF mean in email. A summary can give that answer completely, so it does, and the click has nowhere to go.
Pages that hold up are the ones where the answer is a judgment rather than a fact. Which of these two is worth the money for somebody like me. What broke after six months. What the pricing page does not say. A summary can quote a sentence of that, but it cannot replace it, because the value is in the specifics and the specifics are yours.
So the practical move is not to write for the summary. It is to stop publishing pages whose entire value is a fact anybody can state.
Three things worth doing with a slow afternoon:
Sort your pages by clicks lost year over year and read the top ten. You will see the pattern within about four of them.
On the ones that lost, check whether the page was ever more than its first paragraph. If it was not, either give it something only you can say, or let it go.
Put your own numbers in. A price you actually paid, a date something arrived, a measurement you took. A summary engine can paraphrase a general claim. It is much less able to invent the result of a test you ran.
None of this is a strategy for beating AI search. It is the older point that a page which repeats common knowledge was always the first thing to be replaced, and this is just what replaced it.
