Google’s Doubled AI Overview Visibility; is the Opportunity for SEO Smaller in 2025?

If you’re familiar with Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, you might see where I’m going here. While some metrics like sessions and click through rates may have fallen in some niches, the opportunity to grow revenue, loyalty, and customer base through organic search remains as strong as ever.

Since March’s Core Algorithm Update started rolling out, Advanced Web Ranking are tracking twice as many AI Overviews in their monitored searches.

Marketing managers, and SEOs more generally, are eager to understand what this means for them. How is next month’s report going to look? How will this impact marketing spend into the next financial year?

It’s safe to say that AI Overviews have impacted organic search since their broader introduction in August 2024, but the depth and nature of that impact is unclear.

We can estimate the impact of AI Overviews

While Google tracks impressions, clicks, and position for AI Overviews in Search Console, there’s no way to see this data in-platform. Even if you configure Google Tag Manager to monitor landings from in-line text links, rich results, and AI Overviews, you can’t separate which feature each click came from.

This means we can track which sessions came from some form of tailored result, but we can’t say what share of those were from AI Overviews.

For their part, Google claims that clicks via AI Overviews create higher quality sessions, and that URLs appearing in an AI overview ‘get more clicks than if the page had appeared as a traditional web listing’.

This is unhelpful and potentially misleading without further context – Google haven’t disclosed what metrics they’ve used to measure the quality of sessions, how the comparison of AI Overviews vs traditional listings was carried out and controlled.

Have AI Overviews affected organic traffic?

We know AI Overviews are increasingly visible, so any effect they have had will be more pronounced in 2025. It’s fair to assume that the majority of ecommerce brands are unlikely to see them impacting their bottom line, however.

AI Overviews appear overwhelmingly for informational queries, and reports of click through rates falling by as much as 50% focus on these query types. The most shocking results typically come from informational queries that are already low and zero-click queries.

This lines up with the perspective shared in Mark Williams-Cook’s conversation with Shelley Walsh (building from the work of Jono Alderson). AI Overviews are most effective in meeting users’ needs within a solved knowledge space.

These are queries like “how many ounces are in a gallon”, and “what is the best way to slice a cake for 16 guests” – areas where the answer can be known, and expertise or access to additional resources are unlikely to create a substantially better answer.

Whether a user gets that information from a search result, or a business’ domain is unlikely to change their purchasing behaviour or brand loyalties right away. Before AI Overviews happened, these searches were already at risk of being ‘solved’ by Rich Results and Featured Snippets - queries unlikely to have driven revenue for some time now.

What does this mean for eCommerce?

It’s a given that changing the position of organic listings, and adding features like AI Overviews, will impact user behaviour. However, it’s hard to pin down how this has impacted shopping for much the same reasons as above.

AI Overviews aren’t the only change Google’s made over the last year; not only have AI Overviews been added, so have brand and aggregator search features that encourage users to go direct to established stores rather than exploring blue links.

These search features are not only more visually engaging than blue links, but they imply endorsement and leverage social proof to encourage user engagement. It’s also likely that these use user engagement data, search behaviour, and other sophisticated (and less game-able) metrics to determine inclusion and positioning of brands within them.

In other words, these features will typically favour larger brands with strong reputations and historic data that demonstrates their value to users. Challenger and scale-up businesses will have a much harder time competing for, and with, these features. Brands will need to build their reputation, evidence their quality of service, and grow into their eligibility for these features through user generated content, PR, and brand marketing.

Search results are incredibly dynamic, and the ongoing narrative of a direct relationship between the introduction of AI Overviews to changes in traffic is the result of marketers forgetting that SERPs have changed significantly outside of AIOs.

More broadly, changes to paid surfaces – whose performance Google is incentivised to improve – are the most likely to impact organic performance. When search results consistently place organic results below the fold after multiple Google Shopping features, marketing managers need to understand the relative merits of paid and organic media to balance budgets across channels.

Even in the absence of AI Overviews, it’s probable that organic clicks have fallen in some ecommerce categories. The solution for ecommerce brands is the same as it is for informational queries: SERP analysis and intelligence.

AI Overviews need to be measurable and monitored

The biggest challenge brands face with AI Overviews is that it’s difficult to know what they’re saying from one impression to the next. A blue link or featured snippet will return the same information reliably, pulled directly from a document, but the dynamic nature of AIOs makes it difficult to understand what information is being shared.

It's important for brand and customer care managers to monitor common customer care and service queries in search. While AI Overviews share their source URLs, there remains the risk of policies, product features, and more being misrepresented if important details aren’t included, or third party sources are used in generated content.

AI Overviews present an opportunity to be visibly helpful

While the traffic and revenue opportunities within AI Overviews remain unknown, they remain valuable for visibility and as a touchpoint for customers. Even if traffic gathered by being cited in an AI Overview there’s value in being visibly endorsed by Google.

Achieving placements within AI Overviews isn’t the end-goal of SEO, and doesn’t require a radical strategic shift from marketers:

1.      Have a solid technical foundation, with content search engines can easily retrieve and index

2.     Featured content needs to come from pages that Google’s Generative AI and safeguarding systems consider trustworthy;

a.     Avoid factual inaccuracy where possible

b.     Evidence, or demonstrate direct knowledge of your field

c.     For ‘factual’ queries, avoid opinion and unsubstantiated claims, and show your working/sources

d.     For ‘opinion’ queries, make it clear whose opinion is given and ideally evidence why they are credible

3.     Write clearly in a manner that avoids ambiguity.

The most important step is to have a strong SEO strategy in place – more than 2/3 of links included in AI Overviews also rank on page 1 for the query. With the additional weighting towards individual and brand trust, PR and social proof is only going to grow in importance for brands in search.

Foregrounding our brands’ expertise in their industries, and growing the visibility of positive interactions with our customers, will only stand us in better stead for achieving AI Overview visibility.

AI Overviews have Changed Marketers’ Expectations for SEO

If Google commits to supporting ecommerce and product search through AI overviews, we may need to review how we approach ecommerce optimisation. Reputation management and PR for products, not just brands, might become the next frontier of search amplification, alongside social management.

But as things stand, the most important impact AI Overviews have had on SEO is on reporting, planning, and strategy. As low-value traffic to content hubs falls, business owners and marketing managers are getting a truer measure of organic media’s impact on their business.

Content designed to increase a domain’s session count from queries that offer limited customer and business benefit are likely to lose traffic over time. The question marketers need to ask themselves is ‘how has this impacted profitability, revenue, and growth?’

Not every brand needs to be a content publisher, and most customers don’t need their brands to be a magazine site and encyclopaedia. An intelligent and impactful content strategy grows the brand’s reach by engaging and helping the brand’s customers, and the way to achieve that is to focus on the conversations your brand is qualified and positioned to lead.

Layering on Search Engine Result Analysis to identify the keyword groups and results likely to generate valuable traffic, and reporting on the metrics that matter for the business will guide your organic marketing efforts towards long-term, sustainable growth.