A finance blogger posted in r/Blogging this year with one line: from about 800,000 readers a month to roughly 200 visits a day, right after a core update. That kind of number makes you assume the algorithm turned on you. Often it hasn't.
There are two different problems hiding inside "my traffic dropped," and they need two different fixes. Open Search Console and compare clicks against average position for your top twenty pages. If position held steady and clicks still fell, an AI Overview is probably sitting above you now on that query. If position fell too, you have an actual ranking problem, and refreshing a page won't touch that on its own.
Ahrefs put a number on the first case. Across 300,000 keywords, the top organic result took a 58% lower click rate once an AI Overview appeared above it. That's not a small dent, and it explains how a page can hold its rank and still lose most of its readers.
Once you know which problem you have, the cheap fixes come in order. Refresh the posts that already rank before writing anything new, since they already carry links and some trust in Google's index. Then fix the internal links: a study across 23 million internal links on 1,800 sites found pages with 40 to 44 internal links got roughly four times the average clicks of pages with 0 to 4, though traffic fell off again past about 45 to 50, so more isn't automatically better.
After that, it's about building channels an update can't touch directly: an email list, a handful of AI referral sources tracked on their own, Bing and Copilot (a second search engine for about an afternoon of setup), and Reddit threads where you answer the question before you ever mention your post.
Ram writes about this for RankControl, an AI SEO and AEO platform. RankControl's free AI Overview Checker shows which of your keywords trigger a Google AI Overview and whether you're cited in it, so you can see whether an Overview sits on your queries at all before digging into Search Console.
Full channel-by-channel plan, with the hours each one takes: the Medium post. Try the checker: rctrl.com/ai-overview-checker.