AI Overviews Took Half of a Contractor’s Search Clicks. The Phone Kept Ringing.

Here are the numbers from one of our HVAC clients, a Mitsubishi Diamond Elite contractor in Upstate New York, straight out of Google Search Console. July through September 2026 against the same three months in 2025:

• Clicks from Google search: 2,280 → 1,040. Down 54%.
• Impressions: 577,000 → 270,000. Down 53%.
• Average position: 27 → 19. Better, not worse.

If you only read the first line, you would fire the agency. We are the agency, so let me show you the second half of the report, because it is the half that matters.

Where the clicks went

This site had, for years, been the answer to a few thousand how-to questions a month. Furnace fan limit switch. Musty smell when the heat comes on. Does closing doors in unused rooms save energy. Frozen heat pump coils. One article alone, about fan limit switches, brought 555 clicks over sixteen months from a #4 ranking.

In 2026, Google started answering those questions itself, at the top of the page, in an AI Overview. The article still ranks. People just do not need to click it anymore. Multiply that across sixty or seventy how-to queries and you have the 1,200 missing clicks.

Not one of those visitors was buying a heat pump. They were homeowners in Ohio and Ontario and the Netherlands fixing a furnace at 11pm. Nice to help. Never a lead.

What stayed

Pull the commercial queries out of the same report and the picture flips:

• “hvac companies near me” — average position #2.
• The company’s own name, every spelling of it — #1, with click-through rates between 18% and 31%.
• Mitsubishi dealer and installer searches in its towns — page one, moving up.

Those are the searches a buyer types. They are also the searches an AI assistant runs in the background when someone asks it “who should I call for a heat pump near Glens Falls?” The business is the answer to both, and the answer did not change when the how-to traffic left.

Why the phone kept ringing

Because the business never depended on that traffic. It runs on four things, and none of them is a blog click:

1. Being the name Google and AI give out. Business Profile, reviews, service pages and schema that say exactly what the company does, where, and for whom.
2. Answering every call. An AI booking line picks up 24/7, books the appointment on the real calendar and texts a confirmation. After-hours no-heat calls used to go to voicemail. They do not now.
3. Asking for the review. Every finished job triggers a request. The rating is what the map pack and the AI assistants read.
4. Measuring calls and booked jobs, not sessions. The report the owner sees each month is calls, bookings and revenue by source. Clicks are a footnote.

What this means for your business

If your agency reports traffic, ask them which queries. If half your traffic is how-to questions, expect to lose it this year and understand that you were never going to invoice it anyway. Then put the effort where the buyers are:

• Run the free AI Visibility Check. It asks ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini the questions your customers ask and tells you whether you are the answer.
• Fix the Business Profile, the reviews and the service pages until you are.
• Make sure a human or an assistant answers every call, because the one thing AI search has not changed is that the first company to pick up gets the job.

Every number above is in a Search Console account we can show you. We would rather you see a flat line and a full calendar than the other way round.