AI Overviews and outdoor recreation: what Google's changes mean for your traffic

We wrote the first version of this article in early 2026, when AI Overviews were spreading fast and the data was thin. Six months later, the numbers have filled in. Google also launched AI Mode, which changes things more than the Overviews themselves did.

This is what the updated picture looks like for outdoor recreation businesses.

Where things stand in mid-2026

AI Overviews show up on roughly a quarter of all US searches now. That number keeps climbing, but the expansion is uneven. Google is aggressive with informational queries and cautious with local and transactional ones.

The click-through rate damage is measurable. A December 2025 study found the top organic result loses about 58% of its clicks when an AI Overview sits above it. Pew Research Center looked at 68,000 queries and found users click links 47% less often when Google shows an AI summary.

Sixty percent of Google searches in 2026 end without a click to any website. That number has never been this high.

Content publishers are feeling it the most. Press Gazette reported global publisher traffic from Google dropped 33% in 2025. Chegg lost 49% of its non-subscriber traffic in a single year. If your entire business model depends on people clicking through informational results, you have a problem.

But that is not most outdoor businesses.

Why local outdoor businesses are different

AI Overviews only appear on about 7% of local queries.

Read that again. Seven percent. That is the most important number in this article.

When someone searches “rafting near Buena Vista CO” or “book fly fishing guide Bozeman,” Google still shows the map pack, business listings, and booking pages. The searcher wants to do something, not read a summary. Google knows that and gets out of the way.

The person looking up “book half-day raft trip Browns Canyon” is your customer. The person searching “what is whitewater rafting” was never going to book with you. AI Overviews are absorbing the second type of traffic, not the first.

One thing does deserve a closer look. Local-intent searches produce zero-click outcomes up to 78% of the time. Sounds terrible. But “zero click” in this context means someone saw your phone number, hours, reviews, and directions in the map pack and just called you. Or drove to your shop. They found you and skipped the website entirely. That is not lost traffic. That is a phone call.

And the people who do click through from AI results convert at higher rates than traditional organic visitors. Fewer visits, better visitors.

Google ai mode and what it means for trip planning

Google launched AI Mode in early 2026, powered by Gemini 2.5. It is a different animal from AI Overviews.

AI Mode is a conversation. Instead of typing a keyword and scanning ten blue links, someone can type “plan a weekend rafting trip near Denver for a family with teenagers” and get a response with outfitter recommendations, timing advice, and pricing ranges. They can follow up: “what about something closer to Colorado Springs?” The conversation keeps going.

Google is also building full travel itineraries now. A query like “create a Costa Rica itinerary focused on nature” produces an AI-generated plan with activities, timing, and lodging. Users can adjust budgets, compare locations, and for some products, check out without leaving Google. Etsy and Wayfair are already integrated. Shopify, Target, and Walmart are next in line.

Trip planning is one of the first categories Google is pushing into AI Mode. If your business, your trips, and your pricing aren’t showing up in these conversational results, a growing number of travelers will never see you.

What you can control

The fundamentals from our original article still apply. The priorities have shifted, though.

Google Business Profile is the single most important asset you have for search visibility right now. When AI Mode pulls together a recommendation for rafting near your town, it goes to GBP data first. Missing services, old photos, no recent reviews? It skips you. Our GBP setup guide covers the setup if you haven’t done it yet.

Build pages around things people want to do, not things people want to know. “Book half-day whitewater trip Nantahala River” is safer from AI Overviews than “best whitewater rafting in North Carolina.” One starts a transaction. The other answers a question. Google treats them differently. We wrote about how to build location-specific pages that rank before the season, and that approach matters more now than it did when we published it.

Put real pricing on your service pages. AI answers pull in price ranges, and pages that list actual numbers get cited more often than pages that say “call for pricing.” Your competitors already know your rates. The only people you’re hiding them from are your customers.

FAQ sections earn their keep here too. “Do I need experience?” “What should I wear?” “What age is appropriate?” Two or three clear sentences per answer, right on the service page. Those are the same questions people type into AI assistants, and the format makes your answers easy for Google to grab.

Then there’s the channel question. If 80% of your bookings come from organic Google search, you are overexposed no matter what happens with AI. Email lists, repeat customer outreach, local hotel partnerships, social channels that drive branded search, paid ads for high-intent keywords. Getting organic down to around 50% of your total gives you room to absorb whatever comes next.

What you cannot control

You cannot opt out of AI Overviews. Google will summarize your content whether you like it or not. Some publishers have tried blocking Google’s AI crawler, but for a business that depends on Google to be found, that is self-defeating.

You also cannot control whether your site gets cited in an AI Overview or AI Mode response. Google’s criteria for sourcing are opaque and shift often. Chasing citations as a standalone strategy is a bad bet. Show up in the right places, do the work well, and the citations follow.

How fast Google expands AI Mode into outdoor trip planning is anyone’s guess. It could stay limited for months or become the default way people research trips by next summer. Preparing for both costs you nothing. Betting on one could cost you a season.

Keep perspective

Google has rearranged search results many times. Featured snippets, knowledge panels, People Also Ask, map pack expansions. Every time, someone called it the end of organic traffic. Every time, the businesses that actually served customers found their way through.

AI Overviews and AI Mode are a bigger deal than any of those. The impact on how search works is real and picking up speed. But nobody has ever booked a raft trip from an AI-generated paragraph. People look at your site, read your reviews, check your calendar, and pick up the phone. That part has not changed.

Your traffic dashboard might look different than it did two years ago. That does not mean fewer customers. It might mean fewer people who were never going to book and more people who are ready to.

Keep your GBP current, your service pages specific, and your pricing where people can find it without calling. Everything else is a distraction.