With the arrival of AI Overviews, we entered what many now call “The Great Decoupling”. The moment when clicks and impressions started drifting apart in a very real, measurable way.
It’s logical: if AI Overviews summarize the answer directly in the SERP, there’s often no need to click. That pushes zero-click searches upward, while impressions also rise because your pages can still be seen even when fewer people visit.
The typical outcome: impressions go up, clicks go down.
For SEOs, that creates a new kind of headache, especially when it comes to proving impact. Until recently, click growth was one of the clearest “success indicators” of an SEO project. But as AI reporting tools are still in their infancy, even a genuinely strong SEO performance can get blurred. Particularly if your work focuses on informational content.
This case study is about a project where, despite the decoupling effect, we still managed to grow clicks significantly.
So how did we do it?
The answer is simple: we focused our efforts on commercial and transactional intent pages. These are the types of pages that are typically less affected by AI Overviews in the SERP, and that allowed us to drive click growth efficiently using programmatic SEO.
But let’s get to the beginning, shall we?
The Client and the Project Goal
The client provides car battery roadside assistance across Budapest. The website is a streamlined service site: visitors enter their car’s make/model and specs, the system recommends compatible batteries, and then the customer can order one. Either for immediate delivery/installation or scheduled installation later.
They reached out in summer 2024, after my SEO Vibes talk. Their goal was a typical SEO business strategy: grow organic traffic and organic revenue, and increase visibility against competitors.
In the end, we were working on 2–3 websites in parallel (with all the pros and cons that come with it). But since the majority of our SEO resources went into one primary site, this case study focuses on that one.
A key point: in this project, organic revenue was the primary KPI. That meant our SEO strategy had to prioritize pages that satisfy commercial-transactional search intent. So those pages where the user:
- already understands the problem
- needs a new battery
- can see which batteries fit their car specs
- compares price and provider trustworthiness to decide whether to convert here or elsewhere
For simplicity, I’ll refer to these as “vehicle pages” in the rest of the case study.
We also worked on blog content, with a medium level of emphasis, for three reasons:
- AI was accelerating fast (AI Overviews + broader ChatGPT adoption in the Hungarian market).
- There was a lot of untapped topical potential that might not generate immediate purchases, but builds brand visibility (and that supports point #1).
- Strong informational content also supports stronger performance for the vehicle pages.
Project Challenges: Programmatic SEO and Limited Capacity
After keyword research — which, in our case, was relatively easy thanks to lots of data about the competition and the client’s previous SEO work — we began optimizing the vehicle pages.
And this is where the biggest challenge hit: the sheer volume of vehicle pages.
We’re talking thousands of landing pages, which are simply not realistic to optimize one-by-one manually. So we had to think in programmatic SEO.
Programmatic SEO means engineering SEO recommendations in a way that can be implemented across a large number of pages in a scalable way.
We could only employ solutions that were inherently easy-to-scale. And when it comes to copywriting, scalability is rarely “easy.”
In practice, it meant I had to create wireframes where the constant elements were clearly defined (e.g., customer reviews), while the copy itself included enough meaningful variables to keep pages unique.
One of the most complex tasks was solving two problems at once:
- how to inject enough variables to minimize duplications at scale, and
- how to ensure those variables carry real, unique value, pulled directly from the client’s vehicle database
That second point is a key factor in projects like this.
A major advantage was that the owner was already planning to expand the vehicle database. That meant the site could rank for more “car + battery” keyword combinations. The more car model content assets the site has, the more “car + battery” keywords a site can rank for. And thus, the bigger the search potential.
The downside: it delayed the rollout of the written vehicle page content that was already prepared. Development took many hours, and without the database expansion, launching the new copy wouldn’t have made much sense. Unfortunately, that also meant we couldn’t expect results from those pages during the delay, and we couldn’t fine-tune based on historical data.
That’s partly why we doubled down on blog content during this period: to keep traffic moving, build brand familiarity and authority, and generate additional conversions in the meantime.
Results
The collaboration concluded in autumn 2025.
Between May and September 2025, clicks increased by 200% compared to the same period in 2024. We achieved nearly 3x more impressions YoY.
There has been no SEO work on the site since, and yet performance has continued to climb.
Even with seasonality working against us, the site’s traffic grew significantly thanks to the right SEO tactics.
The December 2025 algorithm update also appears to have gone in the site’s favor: it started ranking in the top 3 positions for more and more keywords.
Visibility in Google AI Overviews
AI Overviews weren’t the explicit focus of the project, especially at the beginning. Still, we created both the content and (especially) the vehicle pages with an “AI-mindset”:
- making the content easy for Google to parse and interpret
- avoiding unnecessary fluff text (which also supports easy vectorization for AI systems)
- using clear Q&A patterns in the writing, and within the programmatic template logic
- maintaining a strong heading hierarchy
Most importantly, automated “content schemas” (NOT structured data markup!) helped us cover “brand+ battery + size” keyword combinations in a scalable way.
Based on Semrush data, the website’s visibility in AI Overviews improved noticeably starting in early 2026.
Key Takeaways
The biggest lesson for me: don’t spread your SEO resources too thin. even when there’s plenty of development- and copywriting capacity available, and even when there’s an absolute C-level buy-in from the client.
On one hand, it’s a wise decision for someone to get the maximum out of a feature under development. On the other hand, it can slow progress: recommendations don’t get implemented, and without implementation, results don’t arrive.
This can also create friction between consultant and client. In this project, we repeatedly had to remind ourselves: the lack of results was due to recommendations not being implemented, yet. And not because of “bad SEO”. Fortunately, the client was absolutely aware of it, plus our communication was strong, so dissatisfaction never became an issue.
In situations like this, the best approach is to focus on only one recommendation (or very few) at a time. Furthermore, find the “good enough” point – roughly 80% perfection – deploy it, and then optimize based on Search Console and other reporting data.
Last but not least, the client feedback: what was his experience during our partnership?
During our collaboration, Csaba proved to be an outstanding partner both personally and professionally. He is curious, constantly learning, and always up to date with the latest trends in SEO and CRO. This approach made our work truly inspiring.
We worked together for two years, during which time we learned incredibly lot from him in content development, technical SEO, web strategy, and in fine-tuning conversion funnels.
Few people understand that the work of a good SEO consultant goes far beyond keywords and rankings. A professional like Csaba is able to define development, design, and content creation strategies that will propel the entire business forward in the long term.
I recommend Csaba to those who are looking not only for results but also for a true professional partnership. And who are willing to invest energy, attention, and resources into making SEO a real business asset.
