In this episode, Glynis Tao discusses the reasons behind declining website traffic for fashion e-commerce sites in 2025. She explores the impact of AI on search behavior, the importance of understanding traffic quality versus volume, and how to diagnose traffic issues using Google Search Console. Glynis also explains the need for a solid technical SEO strategy and the role of high-quality content in maintaining visibility and conversions.
About
Glynis Tao is the founder & CEO of Chase Your Dreams Consulting, which is an apparel business consulting & online marketing agency that specializes in SEO & AI search optimization for e-commerce companies. She helps fashion, beauty and lifestyle e-commerce brands create optimized content and attract potential customers through organic search results.
Takeaways
- Top rankings don’t guarantee clicks if AI answers show up first.
- Lower traffic is not always bad as it could mean better-qualified visitors.
- Use Google Search Console to identify what’s causing the drop.
- Replatforming without redirects can negatively affect SEO.
- Technical issues like slow speed and duplicates hurt rankings.
- Find out if the drop is seasonal, sudden, or gradual to fix it right.
- Blogs still build authority and feed AI content.
- Helpful, specific content keeps you visible in search.
- SEO audits catch hidden issues that impact website traffic.
- Prioritize conversions over traffic volume.
Themes
Why don’t top positions guarantee higher traffic anymore?
You can still hold top positions in Google and see traffic decline. That’s because the search landscape has changed. AI-powered tools like Google’s AI Overviews now answer user questions directly on the results page, leaving fewer reasons for people to click through to your site. It’s not about dropping off page one—it’s about how people find and consume information. If you’re seeing fewer visits but stable rankings, AI could be the reason.
What do fashion brands need to know about traffic quality vs. traffic volume?
It’s easy to fixate on shrinking traffic numbers, but volume alone doesn’t tell the full story. The real question is: who’s visiting your site and are they ready to buy? A drop in overall sessions could be filtering out low-intent visitors, leaving behind more qualified shoppers. Brands that create content addressing specific pain points often attract fewer—but more targeted—visitors who are closer to making a purchase. Understanding this shift helps you focus on conversions, not just clicks.
How can you diagnose website traffic drops using Google Search Console?
One of the most valuable (and underused) tools for troubleshooting traffic loss is Google Search Console. Start by comparing clicks, impressions, and average position over different time ranges. Then dive into specific pages and search queries that are losing visibility. Look for patterns: is traffic down across the board, or isolated to a few key URLs? Is it linked to mobile usability issues, indexing errors, or slower site speed? These clues can point to whether the issue is content-related, technical, or algorithmic.
Why could replatforming or redesigning your site lower your visibility?
Switching platforms, especially moving from Shopify to a headless build can trigger unexpected traffic losses if not managed carefully. Changes to your URL structure, page hierarchy, or internal links can confuse search engines and wipe out your historical rankings. Without proper redirect mapping and pre-launch planning, even a beautiful new site can lose months (or years) of SEO value. Before migrating, brands need a clear redirect strategy and a site audit checklist to avoid preventable setbacks.
What are common technical SEO issues that hurt fashion e-commerce sites?
Slow load times, missing canonical tags, duplicate content, and crawlability problems are some of the most common issues holding back performance. Left unchecked, these problems quietly chip away at your search visibility and user experience. A technical SEO audit—run through tools like Semrush or Search Console—can help you catch and prioritize fixes based on severity and impact. Even a few improvements can make a measurable difference in how your site performs in both human and AI-driven search.
Why aren’t all traffic drops created equal?
Understanding the type of traffic drop you’re seeing is the first step toward fixing it. A sudden, sharp drop may signal a Google algorithm update. A gradual decline might point to technical issues or a recent redesign. If traffic fluctuates seasonally, it could just be tied to buyer behavior. And sometimes, it’s simply a reporting glitch. Distinguishing the cause helps you respond with the right solution, instead of making blind guesses or panicking unnecessarily.
Why does a blog strategy still matter in the age of AI search?
AI-generated answers are pulling information from the best content available—and your blog could be one of those sources. High-quality blog posts still play a strong role in attracting traffic, building trust, and training AI tools to recognize your site as authoritative. To stay visible, your content needs to be helpful, specific, and written with both humans and search engines in mind. Blog posts that solve real problems, showcase your expertise, and reflect your brand voice can still drive meaningful results in an AI-first world.
Chapters
00:00 Understanding Traffic Declines in E-commerce
06:31 The Impact of AI on Search and Traffic
11:27 Diagnosing Traffic Issues with Google Search Console
16:30 Technical SEO and Content Strategy for Recovery
Transcript
Glynis Tao
Why your website traffic is dropping and what to do about it. Here's a candid breakdown of the most common reasons fashion e-commerce websites are losing traffic in 2025 and how to fix them. In this episode, we are going to cover the impact of AI overviews on organic search, technical SEO red flags to watch out for, how to spot issues using Google Search Console, when to run a full technical SEO audit, and quick wins and long-term strategies for recovery. So let's get started.
Welcome to Chase Your Dreams, a podcast for fashion entrepreneurs who want to build a purposeful and profitable clothing business so they can make a living doing what they love. I'm your host, Glynis Tao, an apparel business consultant and SEO specialist with 20 years apparel industry experience. I'm also a mom to a wonderfully energetic little boy named Chase.
Your organic and direct traffic is down, but your site looks fine. Your rankings seem stable and your team is out of ideas. Sound familiar? In this episode, I will break down the real reasons your traffic might be dropping in 2025 and what you can do to fix it. From the growing impact of AI power search to overlooked technical SEO issues, I will share a practical action-oriented guide to help you recover visibility and conversions.
Whether you're a DTC brand or shifting into wholesale, this episode will give you the tools to diagnose the problem and move forward with clarity.
Hi, I'm Glynis. I'm the founder and CEO of Chase Your Dreams Consulting, which is an apparel business consulting and online marketing agency that specializes in SEO and AI search optimization for e-commerce companies. I help fashion, beauty, and lifestyle e-commerce brands create optimized content and attract potential customers through organic search results.
In this episode, you will learn why website traffic can drop even when your site looks healthy, the hidden impact of Google's AI overviews and declining click-through rates, what to look for in Google Search Console, the five most important technical SEO issues on Shopify and headless builds, why blog content still matters and how to make it work for AI SEO.
So let's just talk about the difference between traffic volume and traffic quality. I recently had a conversation with a potential client that runs an e-commerce website saying that they had seen a consistent decline in the website organic and direct traffic over the course of six to seven months and they weren't sure what was going on with it and came to me for help and try and hoping to find a solution to solve the problem to understand what is causing this decline in their organic and direct traffic to their website.
And so to be able to understand what the difference is between your traffic volume and traffic quality, the difference is that you know, traffic volume could be, you may be getting a lot of volume to your website, but perhaps they're not necessarily all converting or turning into sales, right? Because the quality of the traffic. So in the case where today we are seeing a lot more searches happening on other platforms, CI search platforms such as AI overviews or chat GPT, Claude or Perplexity. People are asking questions, looking for answers and typing in questions into their searches. So it's not just the way that search is changing, the way that people are asking questions on search engines.
So in the past where people were using more keywords, they're typing into search engines and then they would get a result on search engine results pages. And then that will require the user to go and click on the blue link that takes them to the website page to find their answer. And they may be looking, but if they don't find their answer, then they would have to go down the list and maybe go to the next website and go read through that. And they keep doing that until they find their answer.
But now with AI overviews and AI search engines, they are providing the answers directly right in the search area so that the people don't need to click to go to the website anymore. They are getting their answers directly in Google. So in the case of AI Overviews, they're typing in the questions and AI Overviews is giving them the answers and doesn't even require them to click on the link to go to the website anymore to get their answers. So Google and other search engines are now focusing on specific keywords, but it's generating answers where the users can get the answers to the questions directly right there.
This could be one of the reasons for the drop in organic traffic because there's less clicks happening across the board. And so you may be seeing perhaps lower volume of traffic, but perhaps maybe your sales have remained the same or perhaps even increased because it's probably due to the quality of the traffic that is going to your website through these searches. Because now the type of questions that people are asking and looking for a solution to, they happen to know your website is creating this quality content that directly addresses your customers' pain points and challenges, then that's a way for them to discover you. And it could be coming through any of these search platforms. And the better you're able to address your customers' problems, pain points and challenges, the better you're able to help them solve this problem. Then you have a better likelihood of converting this client or customer with your product or service.
So, think about it just in terms of, perhaps, you know, volume of traffic has gone down, but has your quality of traffic, you know, remained or have improved or increased over time, right? This is now a different way of looking at things. In the past, we were looking at traffic volume and how much volume we're getting. Think about how much you think of it now in terms of the quality of traffic that you're getting. If somebody is typing in a question and looking for an answer to a particular problem, they're probably, you know, really further along in their purchasing journey. And if your website, your product or service is able to solve this person's problem, then you have a better likelihood of converting them. Nowadays, it's not just the amount of traffic that you're getting, but also the quality of traffic that you're getting because of the way that search landscape is changing.
And so let's talk about how AI search is causing fewer clicks, even when rankings are stable. So this goes back to what I'm saying previously about, you know, increasing the quality of your content. So I have a previous episode that I talk about blogging and how blogging builds brand trust and boost sales. And you can listen to that episode.
AI search is causing fewer clicks. In some instances, some websites have seen up to 25% drop in clicks and traffic and overall traffic. So you got to be able to measure this and see like how much of your, how much is your search traffic being impacted and think about, you know, what is the content that you are creating on your website now, because now it's really more important than ever, but this could also be a reason why you are seeing a decrease or decline in your organic traffic, okay? Because AI search itself, AI search engines are providing you with the answer without having the user to click on a website directly, okay? So that could be explaining the reason for you're seeing a drop.
But in the case of this potential client who came to me who experienced a decline in their direct and organic traffic, they couldn't figure out why and what was going on. And one of the questions I asked them was, have you re-platformed or redesigned your website? And they had to mention that, yes, they changed from Shopify to a headless website. So in this instance, the decline could be explained by change in website structure and URLs. And I actually have another episode where I talk about how to prepare and plan for website redesign. And so there are steps that you need to do in order to prevent potential loss in organic traffic prior to migrating your site, okay, over to a new platform. And so you want to make sure that you have several things in place beforehand. You want to be able to map out your website. You want to identify which pages have the most organic traffic and you want to be able to preserve that traffic.
Map out your website pages, URLs before you move over to the new website. And once you have the new website and you launch, you want to make sure that you have proper redirects in place as well so that you don't lose traffic over time. That's very important. And so in this case, this had to do with a change in website structure.
So there are ways to check for traffic declines using Google Search Console. And I will walk you through that. So what you can do is you can use the performance report and compare current data with past periods. So you want to look for significant drops in clicks, impressions, and average position. Then investigate specific pages and queries to identify the source of the decline.
So I'm going to give you a more detailed breakdown step by step on how to do this. First, you want to access your performance report in Google Search Console. You select your property and then click on performance in the left-hand menu. By default, the report will show you data for the last three months. So you want to set your date range and compare previous periods. So you can click on a date range filter and select a custom range. For example, you can compare the last three months with the three months before that. So you can compare, you know, the last three months to the previous three months. And just by selecting your date range. Next, you can, you want to analyze the data. So you want to focus on clicks, impressions, and average click through rate and average position.
So look for significant drops in these metrics. Then you want to click on pages to see which pages have experienced decline in traffic. And then you're going to click on queries to see which search queries have seen a drop in clicks.
Then you want to investigate this further. To investigate this further, if you see a drop in clicks for a specific page, then investigate that page's content structure and SEO. If you see a drop in clicks for a specific query, you search why that query might be performing worse. Check the Google Search Console coverage report to see if any pages have indexing issues. And you can review the Google Search Console mobile usability report for any mobile related issues.
Lastly, we'll go through the debugging stage, okay? And so if you're unsure why the traffic dropped, you want to try to narrow down the affected pages or queries. Compare the drop period with a similar period to identify the source. See if the drop affects one page, a few pages, or it's site-wide. Look for direct errors in the coverage report and check for Core Web Vitals issues in the Core Web Vitals report. By following these steps, you can effectively use Google Search Console to identify and diagnose traffic declines on your website. And also, Google has a very helpful debugging Google traffic search traffic drops page on their site. This talks about, you know, a drop in organic search traffic can happen for several reasons. And it may not be straightforward to understand what exactly happened to your site. So you want to just go through the steps and be able to identify, investigate the reasons for the drop in search traffic. And then you can come up with a plan on how to address it. But there are four main causes for drops in organic traffic. And I'm just going to explain and walk you through what these are right now.
Okay. So if you see a sudden drop in website traffic, that could be due, that's a sudden large drop that's site-wide, that could be from an algorithm update. So that's usually if you see a sudden drop in your traffic, because Google is always improving and how it's assessing content and updating its search ranking and serving algorithms accordingly. And so they are making so many updates nowadays, you know, like they've made thousands of updates, algorithm updates over the past year. And so that's why you want to take a look and see how drastic is the drop. Another thing that could be causing a drop would be say seasonality. And so if you're seeing kind of more, you know, up and down, activity that could just be due to seasonality. If your products are seasonal, you're selling seasonal products, then you kind of see a lot more of that up and down kind of activity.
And another issue that you could be seeing is the, in the case of this potential client who I was talking to, saying that they were seeing a gradual decline. This to me, would be more of an indication of technical issue, which in my case, I was saying probably due to site structure change in which they, know, previous pages that were ranking had changed in the URLs and they may not have done the proper redirects. So they're sort of starting to see that gradual decline in traffic. Okay, so then you want to take a look at and do a technical SEO audit in this case.
And the last issue could be due to a glitch or recording glitch and that could just be something like your traffic could take a dip, but then it returns back to normal levels. So you have your website traffic and then you sort of see this slight dip, but it eventually returns back to normal. So hopefully it stays that way. And so in that case, you know, maybe you had some broken links in your site. So these are some technical things that you really want to take a look at and assess the situation.
Okay. And just to talk a little bit about technical SEO, I'm going to actually create another episode that talks about the five most common technical SEO issues that I've seen in Shopify and what they are, what the issue is, why it is important, and how to fix it. Technical issues can take form in, page speed, load times in canonical tags, duplication errors, and that sort of thing. And so in the case of this potential client person who I was talking about, I really recommended that they do a technical SEO audit and you can do that in Semrush. And what that does is it checks your site and makes sure that there aren't any crawlability issues that may affect your site's ability to be indexed, probability and indexing issues.
And also if there's any duplicate content or duplicate title tags, meta description, it'll tell you, you know, what are the major issues and errors that will need to be addressed immediately, what priorities, what things would need to be fixed first in order to get your site health in a way that it performs properly. And so that's what I think an SEO audit is important to do so that you're able to diagnose the problem, right? And know exactly what needs to be done to start fixing that and start to regain and repair and, you know, restore that website traffic that they were previously getting. So that was pretty much my recommendation to them.
The last thing I want to talk about, and this was another recommendation that I had mentioned, was how I always encourage all my clients to have a blog strategy. And why this is important is because in today's world of AI search engines, the search landscape is changing, right? So, I mean, traditional SEO still works and is still around and still important, but it's building on that layer that's for AI search. So AI search engines like AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, all those, which I had mentioned earlier, could be causing clicks to go down and overall traffic to decline. I actually recorded a previous episode that talks about how blogging builds brand trust and boosts sales, which I encourage you to have a listen to because I think it's important.
And I still encourage all my clients to use the strategy of blog creation, but you're not just creating content for the sake of content. You’ve got to make sure that you're creating content that, you know, it's high quality, that's written by people, for people, that also helps address the common problems and pain points. But not only does the blog do that, but it also helps you establish your expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness as well, which is a huge factor for search engines and AI search in deciding whether or not they will rank your content or not. And so these are the things that you need to start thinking about in terms of how you're going to adapt and the type of content that you are going to be creating.
And I will be talking more and creating more content in the future about AI search, generative AI, AI optimization, GEO, LLMO, all sorts of things like that because I've been having so many conversations lately and people reaching out to me asking me questions about how to optimize for AI search and is SEO still relevant?
So please stay tuned. I will be creating more content and more future podcast episodes around these topics. And I'd love it if you can let me know if there's anything you'd like to learn more about.
Please send me your questions or any ideas, topics that you would like to hear more about. And I'd love to create those for you. So thank you so much for tuning in today. And I hope you found this episode to be helpful. Thank you so much for listening and have a great day.