On May 14th, 2024, Google launched AI Overviews everywhere in the United States.
What’s that?
It’s a search feature where generative AI summarizes queries at the top of the results page. If you’ve done any Googling since May, you’ve likely seen one of these appear:
As you can see, the AI Overview provides a brief summary of the search term, followed by a more in-depth explanation and the three search results that it got the information from.
The AI Overview feature is a rethinking of the previously planned Search Generative Experience (SGE), something that had SEOs shaking in their boots since its announcement back in 2023.
We were among those concerned, as we published several articles speculating what SGE would mean for the future of SEO at the beginning of 2024. It was an uncertain time because it wasn’t clear how the introduction of generative AI technology would affect search engine marketing (SEM).
In particular, the main fear was that generative AI would steal lots of organic traffic away from publishers.
Well, AI Overviews have been live for a few months now, so what’s the verdict?
Was generative AI in search the death of SEO?
Not at all.
In fact, the results are in line with the predictions we made at the beginning of the year: that continuing to optimize for page one is still the way to go.
In this article, we’ll break down how AI Overviews work, what their impact on SEO has been so far, and what you can do to optimize for the best results – so stay tuned!
What Are AI Overviews and How Do They Work?
An AI Overview is a concise summary of a search query generated by an artificial intelligence.
At face value, an AI Overview’s purpose is to A) provide quick and easy answers to simple queries and B) make it easy for users to find the most trusted and relevant search results.
However, AI Overviews stretch beyond answering simple queries.
Overviews can take on many forms, including snippets, short articles, lists, and more. At times, users will have the option to ask follow-up questions, and you can do things like plan trip itineraries straight from the Overview tab.
The most common type of AI Overview is definitely the short article summary, which tends to pop up for informational queries the most (more on this in a bit).
Here’s what it looks like:
Notice that the top of the Overview contains the highlighted summary. This is the part of the feature that answers the primary question the keyword poses (such as ‘what is a guitar?’) and is the most succinct.
Beneath that, the user gets to learn some brief facts about guitars presented in a short article format.
On the right-hand side are the featured search results the AI used to generate the summary. These are called link cards:
They’re hyperlinked, so users will get directed to the page in question for further reading if they click on the card.
Since AI Overviews tend to appear at the very top of page one (sometimes they appear beneath paid ads), getting featured in a link card is a powerful position to hold.
In fact, Google claims there’s evidence that link cards generate higher click-through rates than traditional results. This would make sense, as these three links stand head and shoulders above the organic search results.
As SEOs already know, users will almost always click on the results that appear at the top of the page due to:
- The convenience
- The perceived superiority of the top-ranked results
So, it goes without saying that getting your website’s content at the tip-top of page one on Google is a good thing.
What’s the secret to getting featured in AI Overview link cards?
Since it’s clear that getting cited in a link card is a valuable position for SEO, how do you optimize for it?
Well, if you recall the articles we wrote at the beginning of 2024 during the height of the SGE Scare (that’s what we’re calling it), we claimed that your best course of action was to continue to implement SEO best practices to try and rank on page one.
Like many other things about digital marketing and SEO, we were correct.
It’s already been discovered that high-ranking organic search results are far more likely to appear as link cards in AI Overviews.
According to research, the #1-ranked organic result has a 55% greater chance to appear as a link card than the #2 results, and this trend continues for each succeeding position.
This means if you’re already implementing SEO best practices in your content, the best thing you can do is maintain the status quo.
SEO strategies to help rank at the top of page one
If you’re a seasoned SEO, feel free to skip this section. For newcomers, solid SEO strategies to rank on page one include:
- Conducting thorough keyword research. If you want to generate lots of traffic, then you need to create what your audience wants. The #1 way to do that is to research the keywords your audience searches for the most. Our free keyword planner tool is a huge help with this process, as it will tell you everything you need to know about any given keyword (and will provide lots of solid recommendations). Look for keywords with a high search volume, low keyword difficulty score, and an upward trend.
- Creating thought-leader-worthy content. Once you have a list of trending terms that your audiences search for online, it’s time to create content specifically tailored for them. This means writing informative blogs, shooting helpful videos, and designing appealing infographics to draw your audience to your website.
- Building backlinks from high-quality, relevant websites. Backlinks are a top ranking factor on Google. A backlink is a link on an external website that ‘points back’ to yours, and it acts as an endorsement of your content’s quality. It’s the equivalent of a reference on a job resume. To rank higher on Google, you need a healthy backlink profile, which means engaging in link-building.
While these are the basics of any SEO campaign, they’re all effective at ranking on page one and thus, they’ll help you get cited in more link cards.
The Impact of AI Overviews So Far
Okay, now that you know how AI Overviews operate, how have they been impacting SEO thus far?
The answer is not a whole lot.
In fact, ever since rolling out AI Overviews in May, Google appears to be scaling back on them exponentially. They now appear for fewer searches than ever before, standing at a meager 1.28%:
The reasons for this vary, although the AI Overview feature’s rocky start likely has something to do with it.
Shortly after the feature debuted, the internet was ablaze with humorous inaccuracies, hallucinations, and bizarre suggestions.
Just to name a few, Google’s AI recommended that users put glue on pizza to help the cheese stick to the dough. In another instance, the Overview encouraged a user to eat rocks.
These stories went extremely viral, which didn’t help the search feature’s reputation.
Besides the rough start, generative AI responses take lots of energy and resources, which may have contributed to Google’s decision to cut back on AI Overviews.
At the moment, Overviews most commonly appear for informational queries.
According to research, 96.5% of all AI Overviews appear for informational keywords. This means very few Overviews will pop up for transactional, navigational, and local searches.
Why is that?
First, informational queries tend to be where AI Overviews are the most helpful. If what you’re after is information (such as the answer to a question), then having an AI Overview provide you with a concise summary of your search query is extremely useful.
Next, it could be that Google wants to avoid YMYL (your money, your life) keywords to avoid potential lawsuits due to inaccurate or harmful AI Overviews. YMYL is Google’s acronym that represents any website that could potentially impact your health, well-being, or finances.
YMYL content requires a higher level of expertise than regular content, and inaccurate information can cause users to lose money, their sanity, or their lives.
Do AI Overviews cause websites to lose traffic?
Before AI Overviews launched, it was predicted that they’d cause a pretty significant drop in organic traffic for virtually every website.
This was especially true back when it was called SGE (which had far more robust features planned), which is why SEOs were preparing for the apocalypse in late 2023.
So, were the urban legends true? Did AI Overviews cause a unanimous loss in organic traffic?
Once again, the answer is complicated and a bit underwhelming.
Research found that when a website was featured in an AI Overview, it experienced an 8.9% drop in organic traffic. If the domain wasn’t listed in a link card in the AI Overview, it was a 2.6% loss in traffic.
While this may seem alarming at first glance, this impact is actually minuscule.
Back when we were stocking our SGE bunkers, we predicted that every website would lose 25% of its organic traffic, which is far more severe.
Even then, we calculated that the traffic loss would be from low-value traffic that wasn’t going to convert anyway.
We predicted that with a rock-solid on-page SEO strategy and a robust backlink profile, websites could still thrive on search engines by ranking in the #1 spot for queries with no AI Overview and appearing as link cards for queries that do.
Now that AI Overviews are here, our advice hasn’t changed.
Also, now that AI Overviews appear for fewer and fewer keywords, you shouldn’t lose much sleep over them. That’s not to say they can’t be a helpful tool when leveraged properly, it’s just that they aren’t the end of the SEM world as we know it.
New AI Overview Features
While the impact of AI Overviews is waning, Google still has new features on the horizon planned for it.
Also, they recently introduced AI Overviews to six new countries. On August 15th, 2024, Google released a statement on its blog that they were bringing AI Overviews to Brazil, India, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, and Britain.
Around the same time, Google added a new feature to AI Overviews and began experimenting with a few others, so let’s take a look at them.
More hyperlinks included in AI Overviews (no longer just three citations)
When the feature was originally launched, Overviews only contained three search results, which were the citations the AI used to generate its summaries.
That changed in August of this year, as AI Overviews now include more hyperlinks contained within the summaries.
Let’s take a look at how these links appear using the example listed before:
Next to each sentence in the mini-article, there are hyperlink buttons that you can click on. Here’s what happens when you select one of them:
Clicking on the hyperlink button next to the Origin sentence brings up a new link card with a search result we can click on.
This new feature is great news for SEOs because it means more search results will appear in AI Overviews (assuming users click on the tiny hyperlink buttons).
So, instead of three results hogging all the glory, now more websites get to join in on the AI Overview fun.
AI Overviews with links embedded in the text
This feature is still in the experimental phase so it hasn’t launched yet. However, Google plans on eventually ditching the tiny hyperlink buttons (thank goodness) in favor of hyperlinking the text inside Overviews instead.
This will make it a lot easier for users to click on other links inside the Overview, heightening the chances that other sites will be able to generate traffic from the feature.
For now, SEOs will have to stick with getting their content featured in A) the initial three link cards or B) the hyperlink buttons listed alongside the text.
Leveraging AI Overviews in Your Favor
To recap, AI Overviews have had a marginal impact on search engine marketing at best.
This is by no means bad news, as the introduction of generative AI to search engines had the potential to wreak havoc on every website’s organic traffic.
So far, that hasn’t been the case, as AI Overviews are largely reserved for vague informational queries.
This means your money keywords (that have transactional and commercial intent) will remain largely untouched.
Also, targeting link cards in AI Overviews can help you generate traffic and raise brand awareness, so there’s no reason not to embrace them for your informational content.
Do you need help forming a winning SEO strategy in the age of generative AI?
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If you’d like to discuss your SEO options in more detail, feel free to book a free SEO consultation.
