What Do Google’s AI Overviews Really Mean For Your Business?

Everyone has seen AI Overviews (AIOs) pop up when they’re searching on Google. In fact, AIOs are almost impossible to miss, appearing above even paid ads for many search queries.

Studies have shown that AIOs appear on between 13% [1] and even up to 53.97% of SERPs in some industries [2]. Clearly, a huge chunk of SERPs are being affected.

It’s also clear that the presence of AIOs tends to reduce click-through rates (CTR) to websites. One study found that AIOs can reduce CTR by from 2.94% to 0.84% [3].

We’ve had a good amount of time to assess the impact of AI Overviews since they were first rolled out in May 2024, and in this article, I’m going to share some surprising, and hopefully reassuring insights.

Our observations come from the SEO work we do daily across our client portfolio of hundreds of brands across different sectors. And most importantly, we’ve seen that while many businesses have lost out on traffic due to AIOs, fundamentally, few businesses have seen their organic revenue negatively impacted.

Here are four trends that apply to the majority of businesses we’ve worked with.

Your Competitors Aren’t Winning Either

An easily overlooked point with AIOs is that your competition is facing the exact same challenge as you – all boats rise and fall with the tide.

It’s certainly true that AIOs have impacted some industries more than others. Indeed, in certain media and knowledge industries, AIOs have been extremely destructive to businesses. Chegg, an education company, has taken Google to court over AIOs [4].

Many ad-reliant news publications have seen significant declines in revenue due to decreased traffic. For example, DMG Media, which owns MailOnline, Metro and other titles, said that AIOs led to click-through rates dropping by up to 89% [5].

But in most industries, AI Overviews have meant little more than a slight, industry-wide drop in traffic, which has affected everyone equally.

You, just like your competitors, will have seen a dip in traffic to some of your informational content. But when the same issue is experienced industry-wide, it means that actually, all things end up looking fairly equal.

While some algorithm updates have a particular impact on individual sites, what we’ve tended to see with AIOs is that there aren’t many big winners or big losers – and that any minor losses can be offset with gains in other areas of your SEO strategy.

Traffic Is a Vanity Metric

In the world of SEO, and digital marketing generally, traffic is often treated as a KPI. But what we’ve seen in recent months has demonstrated how vain the desire for mere traffic can be.

In many cases, AIOs have removed the need for users to click through to websites, because they can get the information they want without needing to click. The good news for you is that giving away free information probably isn’t a fundamental part of your business model – you were never going to directly earn anything from it, anyway.

Of course, it’s important for businesses to provide information to their customers, but the way that we do this has evolved – a point we’ll look at in a moment.

You may have seen a traffic decrease of 20% or higher, if you previously earned a lot of traffic from blog posts. But we’ve seen sites lose this much traffic, paired with an increase in conversion rate, and in organic revenue, due to gains in other aspects of their SEO.

Visibility and Impressions Count

Another trend that we’ve observed is websites that have lost traffic to AIOs, but have nonetheless seen a boost in impressions and in overall visibility.

What this seems to mean is that a site may be receiving fewer clicks, but that users will still have seen that brand represented in the SERPs. This means that a user may still have seen your brand name, perhaps as the top “blue link”, or perhaps mentioned in the AIO directly, or as a citation.

The vain, traffic-seeking part of any digital marketer would naturally prefer to see users clicking-through in a neat, measurable way. But the jury is still out on how much difference this necessarily makes. A lot of the traffic that AIOs take tends to be very much top-of-funnel.

If potential users are still seeing your brand name, at least somewhere on the SERP, it would seem that that still counts for something.

This has certainly been the case for our own brand, The SEO Works. The chart below shows that whilst clicks to our website have fallen, our total impressions have increased. Lead volume stayed the same as historical levels across these months. Being visible in AI overviews has been important in keeping our brand front of mind.

Differentiation Is Key

The prevalence of AIOs has meant that businesses need to think a little more carefully about differentiating themselves with the sort of content that they publish. Concretely, this tends to mean less focus on generic or top-of-funnel content and more focus on what is unique about your business.

Since the rise of AIOs, there is little point anymore in publishing generic advice that Google can easily find on other websites (the reality is that while this content has always driven traffic, it has rarely driven conversions).

This means that, increasingly, our content strategies focus more on demonstrating E-E-A-T, and on “information gain” – imbuing content with your expertise, your unique voice, and your insights which are not available elsewhere.

AIOs mean that basic content can easily be provided directly by Google in the SERP. But what can’t be easily replicated by Google is your expertise and detailed insight that shows what makes your business stand out.

What Now? Practical Steps Businesses Should Take

The rise of AI Overviews doesn’t call for any drastic changes, but in most cases, it does call for an adjustment of priorities within any given SEO strategy. The response to AI Overviews is not to chase lost clicks, but to align SEO more closely with business outcomes. 

Businesses that do this tend to see far less impact than the headlines suggest. Here’s an action plan you can follow:

1) Prioritise E-E-A-T

Ensure that the content across your site demonstrates experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Where it once seemed best to publish reams of new informational content, in most cases today, time is better spent on upgrading existing content to the highest standards.

2) Prioritise Conversions

In most cases, you shouldn’t spend too long scrambling after lost clicks from informational queries. Instead, focus your attention on increasing conversion for users on your site. In many cases, this goes hand-in-hand with E-E-A-T, but this also extends to wider UX and CRO considerations.

3) Reassess Your True KPIs

If you’re like 99% of other businesses out there, you’ve probably seen a slight reduction in traffic, but no significant drop in conversions and revenue.

The rise of AI Overviews has caused many businesses to rightly understand that clicks alone can be a vanity metric. It has also brought to the fore the importance of visibility, of impressions, and of all brand-related metrics.

4) Pay More Attention to Off-Site

There are more reasons than ever why SEO should go hand-in-hand with digital PR and wider brand marketing efforts. For both SEO and GEO, off-site mentions are essential for demonstrating the trustworthiness of brands to AI platforms.

Improving your visibility in wider digital media is increasingly tied to SEO, which is why digital PR is more important than ever.

5) Use Content Optimisation Tactics When Suitable

While there is generally no need to panic about AI Overviews, in some cases, it’s worth optimising your content to increase your chances of being mentioned in an AIO. In these cases, you should use content tactics and tactical tests to increase your chances of maintaining visibility for priority keywords.

Conclusions

The upshot of all this is that while AIOs continue to feature prominently in Google Search, their impact on most businesses remains minimal.

Since the inception of AIOs, we’ve worked with dozens of businesses – some have seen AIOs take a chunk of their traffic, and in some rare cases, AIOs have been leveraged to lead to more traffic – but in almost all cases, AIOs have had very little impact on organic conversions and revenue.

This doesn’t mean that AIOs don’t matter – far from it. We still want to appear in AIOs, and we use the latest content engineering tactics to do so with our GEO Services. But at present, AIOs form just a small part of a broader content strategy that is carefully designed to build EEAT, boost visibility, improve CRO, increase conversions, and ultimately grow your business.

Sources

[1] https://www.semrush.com/blog/semrush-ai-overviews-study/

[2] https://serpstat.com/blog/year-in-search-ai-overview-study/

[3] https://www.seerinteractive.com/insights/how-ai-overviews-are-impacting-ctr-5-initial-takeaways

[4] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/24/chegg-sues-google-for-hurting-traffic-as-it-considers-alternatives.html

[5] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/68a5aa50a6acbbc7fb96a3b2/DMG_Media.pdf