Did Gemini AI reduce impressions?

Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi

Did Gemini AI reduce impressions?

And does blocking Google-Extended affect AI Overview visibility?

guarriman3

9:01 pm on Oct 21, 2025 (gmt 0)

Hi everyone,

I run a website with about 350,000 pages, each showing detailed information about Mexican insects (maps, stats, photos, etc.).
The site is in Spanish, and around 90% of the traffic comes from Google Mexico.

Over the last two years, Search Console impressions have been steadily dropping, even though content quality and structure haven’t changed much.

I have two questions:

1) Could Gemini / the new AI Overview mode be responsible for this decline?
Has anyone seen fewer impressions since AI Overviews started showing in Google Search?
Is there any reliable way or tool to check if your site is being replaced by AI-generated answers?

2)About robots.txt:
I currently block AI crawlers like this:

User-agent: Google-Extended
Disallow: /

Does this prevent Google from citing my site inside AI Overviews or reduce visibility in those results?

Thanks — I’d love to hear if anyone has tested this or noticed similar trends.

guarriman3

9:43 pm on Oct 21, 2025 (gmt 0)

According to Google Official Blog (https://blog.google/products/search/ai-mode-spanish/), 'AI Mode' in Spanish was launched on Sep 23, including Google Mexico.

If you see the impressions chart in GSC (https://ibb.co/609NC5pT), the figures started to decrease on that day.

Do you see the link between 'AI Mode' in Spanish and the impressions drop?

christianz

10:29 pm on Oct 21, 2025 (gmt 0)

Why would you want your site cited in AI Overviews? If you think you will get any traffic from those citations, I have bad news for you.

If there was option to forbid Google from including my site in citations, I would absolutely enable it. But Google, thanks to its protected monopoly status and exclusion of all liability, does not provide such option and they do it on purpose.

Having your site NOT appear in AI citations at least gives you chance that it will be featured as a normal search result, which user may actually click on. And it also makes the AI Overview not contain your valuable content, which may render it useless if your content is unique.

Whitey

6:10 am on Oct 22, 2025 (gmt 0)

There’s probably a connection, but not necessarily for the reason we first think.

A few things are happening at once:

AI Overviews / Gemini rollout – Since the Spanish “AI Mode” launch on 23 Sep, sites with informational content (like yours) have reported lower impressions and CTR. Studies show CTR for top organic results drops 15–30 % when an AI Overview appears. So the visibility loss is real, just not always labelled clearly in GSC.

Data cleaning in Search Console – Around the same time, Google quietly adjusted how impressions are counted. They’ve filtered out bot/scraper traffic and removed the num=100 parameter that inflated some counts. So you can see a sharp “impressions drop” even when real clicks and traffic stay the same. It’s cleaner data, not a penalty. You can probably see that your search positions are dramatically improved as a consequence.

Blocking Google-Extended – That only opts you out of Gemini’s training datasets. It does not stop Google from citing your pages inside AI Overviews, because those are considered part of main Search. And it doesn’t hurt your rankings either. So the line in robots.txt you posted is harmless, but it won’t fix visibility.

Takeaway: Your drop likely reflects a mix of cleaner reporting plus AI Overviews eating the top of the SERP. If clicks and conversions are steady, don’t panic – you’re just seeing truer numbers. If clicks really fell, focus on making your pages indispensable (unique visuals, structured data, brand recognition) so users still choose to click through when AI snippets appear.

guarriman3

10:05 pm on Oct 24, 2025 (gmt 0)

Thank you! The thing is that (as you can see on the screenshot at [ibb.co...] ) the real clicks and traffic are not steady.

So I will try to develop the "unique visuals, structured data and brand recognition". I'm trying to locate more sources of maps and photos, and encourage users to share their own stuff through my site.