The short answer: Google now answers a large share of informational queries directly with AI Overviews, and users click through far less — Pew's data put onward clicks at about 8% with an AI Overview versus roughly 15% without. If you build for the web in Pakistan, stop optimizing for the click and start optimizing for the citation: the content that gets quoted inside the answer is the content that wins.
Wait — is traffic actually dead?
No, but the shape changed. Transactional and branded queries still click through fine. What collapsed is the informational long tail — "how do I…", "what is…" — which is exactly where most Pakistani startups and indie builders were getting their cheapest traffic. Writing another 1,500-word keyword-stuffed guide won't fix it, because the AI summarizes your guide and the user never visits.
The new question isn't "how do I rank?" — it's "how do I get cited?"
What AI answers actually cite
I've been watching which pages show up as sources inside AI Overviews and chat answers, and the pattern is consistent. Cited content is:
- Answer-first. The direct answer sits in the first two or three sentences, not after three paragraphs of throat-clearing.
- Factual and quotable. Definitions, numbers, dates, step sequences — things an answer engine can lift verbatim.
- Structured like an FAQ. One question per heading, short self-contained sections, because AI retrieval chunks by section.
- Fresh and specific. Current data beats generic advice. "Pew, 2025" beats "studies show."
Notice what's missing from that list: brand voice, clever hooks, SEO plugins. The AI doesn't care how pretty your intro is. It cares whether your page contains a clean, extractable answer.
The format that works: build for the chunk
Here's the practical checklist I now use for anything informational:
- Put the answer before the article. A two-sentence TL;DR at the very top. (This post does exactly that.)
- One question per H2. Write headings the way people actually ask — "Is traffic dead?", "What gets cited?" — not "Introduction" or "Conclusion."
- Keep sections self-contained. Each one should make sense if quoted alone, because that's how it will be quoted.
- Use tables and lists. AI systems love structured comparisons. A three-row table beats a paragraph of prose.
- Say the fact, then show your work. Lead with the number, follow with the source. Neutral citations (Pew, official docs, government data) get lifted more often than vendor claims.
- Update, don't republish. A living page with a current date outperforms a new clone every time.
This is the same discipline technical docs have used forever — it's just that now the reader is often a model, not a human.
The Pakistan-specific angle
Two things make this especially relevant for us. First, a huge share of Pakistani search happens in Roman Urdu and mixed English — "best mobile 50000 ke under kaunsa hai" — and AI Overviews answer those too. If your content answers the Roman Urdu version of the question plainly, it can get cited where English-only competitors can't.
Second, our distribution culture is screenshots, not links. People forward the AI's answer in WhatsApp groups, not your URL. Being the cited source inside that screenshot is the branding — your name rides along even when nobody clicks. I've started structuring every help and explainer page this way on the marketplace I'm building (Findsha — find what you need, offer what you have), because the citation is the visit now.
One thing not to do
Don't write content that only exists to rank and secretly hopes the AI ignores it — hidden keyword paragraphs, answers buried under ads, definitions hidden behind "click to read more." Answer engines penalize exactly the behaviors old SEO rewarded. If a human skimming your page can't find the answer in five seconds, the model won't quote you either.
The bottom line
The click isn't coming back for informational queries. But attention didn't disappear — it moved one layer up, into the answer itself. Builders who write clear, quotable, answer-first content get their expertise distributed inside every AI response on the topic. That's a bigger surface than page one of Google ever was.
Write for the answer, not the click.
Top comments (1)
We need to produce a short YouTube comment, casual, one or two sentences, maybe a fragment, with lower case start, no quotes, no hashtags, no URLs. Must be about the video content: "What Pakistani Builders Should Do Now That Google Answers Instead of Linking". So comment could ask about tactics for SEO given AI answers, maybe ask about local SEO, or mention "ngl this changes the game for us". Must be short. Use casual voice, maybe "tbh". Must not start with "Great video".