How AI Overviews Have Actually Affected My Travel Blog (And What I’m Doing About It)

As soon as Google rolled out AI overviews, my traffic dropped by around 90%.

That’s not a typo.

Because I’d relied heavily on ad income for years with only a little affiliate income on the side, my earnings dropped by roughly the same amount.

Almost overnight, the thing my entire business had been built on for over a decade stopped working the way it always had.

So if you’re newer to blogging, or you’ve been doing this a while and you’re worried, here’s what actually happened to me and what I’ve changed because of it.

What AI Overviews Actually Are, in Case You’re Not Sure

If you haven’t come across the term, AI overviews are the AI-generated summaries that now show up at the top of a lot of Google searches.

They answer the question directly on the results page instead of sending someone through to a website.

For a travel blogger, that’s a big deal.

A huge amount of our traffic used to come from people searching quick factual questions, things like “is tap water safe to drink in X” or “do I need a visa for Y”.

Now Google just answers those on the spot, pulling together an answer from multiple sites, mine included, without the person ever needing to click through and actually read the post.

Those were never our highest-earning posts individually, but there were a lot of them.

Quick factual guides are easy to write and easy to rank for, which is exactly why so many blogs, mine included, had so many of them.

Losing that volume all at once is exactly what caused the drop.

What I Noticed First

The first sign wasn’t actually the traffic number.

It was that some of my oldest, most reliable posts started getting far fewer clicks even though their rankings in Search Console looked more or less the same.

That’s the part that took me a while to understand.

A post can still be ranking well and still lose most of its clicks, because the answer is now sitting right there on the results page.

The ranking hadn’t dropped.

The need to visit the site had.

Once I understood that, it reframed the whole problem for me.

This wasn’t really a rankings problem I could fix with better SEO in the traditional sense, it was a visibility-versus-clicks problem, and that meant the fix had to be different too.

SEO Isn’t Dead, It’s Just Different Now

This whole shift taught me that SEO is still the number one driver of traffic to my site, it just doesn’t work the way it used to.

It’s also not only about Google anymore.

You can show up in ChatGPT and Claude too, so the game has genuinely widened rather than closed.

Being findable across more than one platform means you’re not entirely at the mercy of one company’s product decisions the way I effectively was.

The traffic I do get now tends to be better quality, even if there’s less of it overall.

The people still clicking through are the ones who want more than a one-line answer, they want the full picture from someone who’s actually been there.

Why I Flipped My Strategy to Affiliates First

Because I was relying so heavily on ad income, losing 90% of my traffic hit me hard financially.

Ad revenue is almost entirely a numbers game, so when the numbers disappeared, so did that income.

There was no cushion built in because I’d never needed one before.

Affiliate income doesn’t work the same way ad income does.

You can get a thousand clicks on a post, but if the affiliate links aren’t relevant or well placed, you won’t earn anything from it.

On the flip side, a post with far less traffic but the right links in the right places can genuinely outearn a high-traffic post with none.

So my focus has completely flipped, affiliate marketing is now my number one priority, not an afterthought.

That’s meant going back through old posts and making sure every relevant hotel, tour and product actually has a link on it, not just the newest content.

I’ve written up exactly how I approached monetising my old blog posts, since that backlog was where most of the missed income was hiding.

A tool like Stay22 made that process a lot faster than going through every post by hand.

How I Rebuilt My Traffic Strategy Post by Post

Rebuilding after a drop like that isn’t something you can do all at once.

I worked through it post by post, starting with the content that was losing the most clicks despite still ranking.

For each one, I asked the same question.

Is this a quick factual answer that Google can now answer itself, or is this something that genuinely needs a full page and a real opinion?

The quick factual posts I mostly left alone, there wasn’t much point fighting that battle.

But the posts that had potential to be something more, I rewrote with much more of my own experience and opinion woven through them.

That process is still ongoing, it’s not something you finish in a month.

But it’s given me a much clearer sense of which of my posts are worth investing more time in.

Personal Experience Is the Biggest Shift I’ve Made

The biggest change in my own writing has been leaning much harder into personal experience.

My titles and posts used to read more like something from a generic travel guide.

Now I write like I’m telling a friend about it, with my own experience right there in the first paragraph and often in the headline itself.

Instead of “Things to Do in [Destination]”, I’m writing “Things to Do in [Destination] That I’d Actually Recommend to a Friend”.

As soon as I made that switch, my traffic and rankings both went up.

Part of the reason that works is that an AI overview can summarise a generic list of attractions in seconds.

But it can’t summarise my actual opinion of a place, or the specific thing that went wrong on a tour, or which restaurant I’d genuinely go back to.

That has to come from a real person who was actually there.

That’s exactly the gap I’m now trying to write into on every post.

Going Deep on One Destination, Not Wide Across Many

I’ve also focused on going deep rather than wide.

I lived in Saranda, Albania for over eight years.

So instead of touching on lots of places briefly, I try to answer every question someone could possibly have about it, sometimes 20 to 30 posts deep on one destination.

That’s what tells search engines you’re actually an expert on the topic.

It also means that even when one individual post loses traffic to an AI overview, the cluster around it as a whole is still strong enough to hold its rankings.

Someone who lands on one post in that cluster is far more likely to click through to another one of mine than to go searching for a different site entirely.

It’s the same advice I give in what I wish I’d known about monetizing a new blog, and going wide too early is one of the money mistakes I made as a newer blogger myself.

Honest Reviews Are Doing Well Right Now

Reviews are another format that’s working well for me at the moment, because personal experience comes through so clearly in them.

If you’ve done a tour and you’d recommend it, write it up.

What you liked, what you didn’t, and be properly honest about it, not just the good parts.

These kinds of posts are showing up in AI overviews, and they tend to be strong affiliate earners too, because people are actively looking for opinions they can trust before they hand over money for a tour or activity.

An AI overview can tell someone what a tour includes.

But it can’t tell them whether it was actually worth the money.

What I’d Say to Anyone Panicking About This Right Now

If you’re newer to blogging and this all sounds discouraging, it isn’t meant to be.

It just means the posts that win now are different from the posts that won five years ago.

Quick factual answers are what AI overviews are best at replacing.

So if that’s most of what you’re writing, that’s the part of your strategy that needs to shift, not blogging itself.

Lean into what only you can offer, your actual experience, your honest opinion, your specific story.

That’s the one thing no AI overview can generate for someone searching.

The sooner you build your content around that, the less exposed you’ll be if something like this happens again.