Motta Industries Blog

For years, a local service business could judge its website by a simple trend line. If search visits went up, the site was probably doing its job. If they went down, something needed fixing. That rule of thumb is getting less reliable. Search pages now often open with an AI-generated summary, and some people get what they need from that summary without visiting any site at all.

For an electrician, a dental practice, a bookkeeper or a landscaping company, this raises a fair question. If fewer people click, how should you measure whether the website is working? This guide looks at what recent research and Google’s own guidance say, then lays out goals that fit how service customers actually decide.

What the research found

In July 2025, Pew Research Center published a short read titled Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results. The researchers studied the March 2025 browsing activity of 900 U.S. adults who agreed to share it.

Searchers who saw an AI summary clicked a traditional result in 8 percent of visits. Those who did not see one clicked in 15 percent of visits, almost twice as often. Clicks on links inside the summary itself happened in just 1 percent of visits. People also ended their browsing session more often after a page with a summary, 26 percent compared with 16 percent.

The study found that about 18 percent of the Google searches it examined produced a summary. Longer searches, full sentences and questions starting with words such as “who,” “what” or “why” were much more likely to trigger one.

Those findings describe a sample of people during one month. They are not a prediction for any single business. They still point to a pattern worth taking seriously: informational searches, the kind that start with a question, are the ones most likely to be answered on the results page.

Why service sites feel this differently

A service business usually depends on two kinds of search. One is informational: “why is my breaker tripping,” “how often should I get my teeth cleaned,” “what records do I need for my taxes.” The other is decision-stage: “electrician near me,” a company name, or “emergency plumber open now.”

The first kind is where AI summaries tend to appear and where clicks are most likely to thin out. The second kind is where customers are ready to call, book or ask for a quote. A drop in blog traffic for general questions may look alarming on a chart while having little effect on how many people actually contact you.

That is why the goal needs to shift from “more visits” to “more of the right actions from the visits you get.”

What Google says to measure

Google’s May 2025 post, Top ways to ensure your content performs well in Google’s AI experiences on Search, makes a related point directly. Google said that when people click to a website from results pages with AI Overviews, those clicks are higher quality, with users more likely to spend more time on the site. It cautioned that site owners might miss this if they focus too much on clicks instead of the overall value of visits, and suggested looking at indicators of conversion such as sales, signups, a more engaged audience or information lookups about your business.

That is Google’s own claim about its own product, so treat it as one perspective rather than settled fact. The advice about conversions holds up regardless, because it reflects what a service business needs from its site.

Goals that fit a service business

Here are measures that tell you more than a raw visit count.

Phone calls from the site. For many service businesses, the phone is still the main way new customers make contact. Make phone numbers tappable on mobile and track taps as events in your analytics. If you use call tracking, keep numbers consistent with your business listings.

Booking and quote requests. Count completed forms, not form views. Note which page the visitor submitted from, so you can see which services and articles lead to contact.

Direction requests and business lookups. If customers come to your location, track clicks on map links. Searches for your business name are also a useful signal that people remember you.

Engaged visits to service pages. Time on page alone can mislead, but a visitor who reads a service page, views pricing and then opens the contact page is showing intent.

Lead quality. Ask your team to note whether each inquiry was a real prospect, a wrong fit or spam. A month with fewer visits and more qualified inquiries is a better month.

Content that earns the visit

If general answers increasingly appear on the results page, the content that brings people to your site has to offer something a summary cannot.

Google’s August 2022 post, What creators should know about Google’s August 2022 helpful content update, offers a useful test. It asks whether content demonstrates first-hand expertise, whether the site has a primary purpose and whether readers will leave feeling they learned enough to reach their goal. It also lists warning signs: mainly summarizing what others have said without adding much value, writing about trends rather than your audience’s needs, and leaving readers feeling they need to search again. The post said that content created primarily for search engine traffic is strongly correlated with content searchers find unsatisfying.

For a service site, content that passes this test tends to include:

• Real local detail. Permit timelines in your county, common problems with older homes in your area or the seasonal schedule you actually follow.
• Your process. What happens on the first visit, how long a typical job takes and what the customer needs to prepare.
• Honest pricing context. A range, the factors that change it and what is included.
• Photos of your own work. Clearly labeled before-and-after images from real jobs, with customer permission.
• Clear next steps. A phone number, booking link or quote form placed where readers finish an article, not only in the footer.

The May 2025 post says something similar about AI search, urging site owners to focus on unique, non-commodity content and noting that people in AI experiences ask longer and more specific questions. A service page that answers “how much does it cost to replace a water heater in a two-story home with the tank in the attic” is more useful than one that defines what a water heater is.

Keep the technical basics solid

None of this replaces the fundamentals. The same Google post lists making sure pages meet technical requirements, providing a good page experience across devices, keeping structured data consistent with visible content and supporting text with images and video. It also notes that Business Profile information should be current.

For a service company, that means a fast mobile site, a working contact form, accurate hours and service areas, and schema markup that matches what the page says. If your listing says you close at five but your site says six, fix it.

Rethink the reports you review

Most small businesses look at a handful of numbers each month. A practical reset might look like this:

1. Replace “total sessions” at the top of the report with “contacts”: calls, forms and bookings combined.
2. Show organic search contacts separately, so you can see whether search is still producing business even if visits fall.
3. Group pages by purpose: service pages, location pages, articles and contact pages.
4. Review search queries in Search Console, separating questions from service and name searches.
5. Add a short monthly note from the person who answers the phone about what callers asked and where they heard of you.

That last step is old-fashioned, and in practice it is often the most revealing of all. Customers frequently mention that they found you through an online search and then called after reading a specific page.

Decide which articles still matter

An older blog may hold dozens of posts that answer general questions. Some still bring visitors who become customers. Others no longer earn clicks and offer little a summary does not already say.

Review each article against two questions: does it lead to contacts, and does it contain something only your business could write? Articles that do both deserve updating. Articles that do neither might be merged into a stronger page or retired. The 2022 Google post noted that removing unhelpful content could help the rankings of other content on a site, which makes regular pruning part of good maintenance.

Our content updates service handles exactly this kind of review, refreshing the pages that still work and consolidating the ones that no longer pull their weight.

A fictional example

Consider a heating and cooling company whose blog traffic falls by roughly a third over a year. The owner is worried. When the team looks more closely, the drop is concentrated in general articles such as “what is a heat pump.” Visits to service and location pages are steady, and tracked phone calls from organic search have risen slightly.

The company stops chasing general topics. It rewrites its heat pump page to cover local rebates, its installation process and typical timelines, adds clear photos from real installs and puts the phone number near the top. It retires a handful of thin posts. Six months later, blog visits remain lower, but contact form submissions from the service pages are up and callers more often say they read about the installation process before calling.

This example is fictional. It shows how shifting the goal changes the decisions, not what your own numbers will be.

Set expectations with your team

Changing the goal also means changing how you talk about results. If an agency or staff member reports only on traffic, ask for contacts and lead quality next to it. Agree on what counts as a qualified inquiry for your business, such as a caller inside your service area asking about work you actually do. Review the numbers every quarter, together and calmly, rather than reacting to a single slow week, since seasonal demand and weather can swing service calls far more than any search change.

Where to start

Lower click counts are not automatically bad news for a service business. They may simply mean that the people who would never have called are getting a quick answer elsewhere. Your real job is to make sure the people who are ready to hire find a clear, specific and trustworthy site when they arrive.

Our search engine optimization team can help you set up tracking for calls and forms and see which searches still bring business. And if your service pages read like everyone else’s, our copywriting team can help you rewrite them around the details only your business can offer.