What is AI Overviews’ Impact on SEO?

The Pre-Launch Hype

Ever since Google released its latest Search Generative Experience (SGE), AI Overviews, on May 14, we have received lots of questions and fearful theories about how detrimental the new search feature would be to SEO efforts and website traffic.

We were sent scary news articles, like this one, days after the feature’s release reporting on how entire companies went out of business as a result of the change. Even some of our favorite SEO gurus warned us to expect a decline in search impressions and clicks as a result of the new feature.

Yikes.

Anxiety-ridden SEOs everywhere prepared in Y2K-esque fashion for the doomed arrival of Google’s much-talked about search feature to emerge from the labs and into the wild.

When the day finally arrived, we braced for impact. How would this new feature impact our clients’ search traffic? How much should we change our current SEO strategies to optimize for this new feature? And, most importantly, would we be out of a job?

AI Overviews’ Impact on Search Traffic

Now that AI Overviews has been in the wild for well over a month, we are beginning to discover exactly what its ramifications are to organic search traffic.

Turns out, AI Overviews isn’t so bad after all.

Although we can’t exactly claim that AI Overviews is great for search traffic necessarily, it’s not the end of search engine marketing as we know it either. So far, the results seem to be a bit of a mixed bag.

We have seen studies that show positive results, including increases in total impressions and click-throughs after the launch, and we have also seen studies showing the opposite. So we decided to take a look into it ourselves. 

The Huckleberry Hypothesis: More Impressions, Fewer Clicks

Our own hypothesis was that the impact of the AI Overviews feature would be similar to when Google introduced “featured snippets”. Featured snippets were designed to serve direct, immediate answers to users’ search queries directly on the search engine results page (SERP), thus reducing the need for the searcher to click through to a website to retrieve their answer. The result? More impressions, but fewer click-throughs to websites.

Ahrefs’ study on the click-through-rates on featured snippets showed that the top featured snippets only got 8.6% of clicks, while a top organic result when no featured snippet was shown received an average of 26% of all clicks. Even the top organic search result below the featured snippet got more clicks than the top featured snippet result.

Source: Ahrefs’ Study Of 2 Million Featured Snippets: 10 Important Takeaways

So, you can see the resemblance between featured snippets and SGE, right? In both cases, your answer is given to you, right then and there in the SERP. Our hypothesis was that we would see higher impressions (if we are able to capitalize on ranking for AI Overviews), but no meaningful increase in website traffic as a result.

Interestingly enough, now searches that used to show featured snippets first are now showing both the AI Overview and featured snippets in SERPs. Our guess is that AI Overviews may replace featured snippets altogether one day.

Our Findings So Far

While the lead-up to the “big reveal” was rife with panic, I’d say the actual results are far less negative than everyone feared.

No Negative Impact in Impressions and Clicks Overall

In our own analysis of our SEO clients’ websites in the 4 weeks prior to the rollout versus the 4 weeks after, we found a 10.69% increase in impressions and a 2.98% increase in clicks from search overall. Sites in our data set include a mix of ecommerce, brick-and-mortar retail locations, and professional service businesses in various industries, including health care, finance, technology, real estate, and manufacturing.

Granted, these general “before and after” metrics do not take any other variables into consideration, such as whether that traffic came from branded or unbranded searches or whether search queries were subject to AI Overviews or not. What these broad metrics do uncover, however, is that AI Overviews’ impact on our overall SEO strategies were not significant enough to swing results drastically one way or the other.

For good measure, we dug deeper to see what other insights we could glean about the impact AI Overviews had more specifically on our clients’ organic web traffic. Here’s what we found:

The Position of AI Overviews Site Links Matters

According to Google’s initial findings (in its Search Labs, mind you), AI Overviews links get more clicks than traditional search results. Whether that’s true in reality, outside of its Search Labs, however, remains to be seen. What we found in our small sample study is that AI Overviews links do, in fact, receive more clicks than traditional search results before AI Overviews, but only if they are in the top 3 positions. 

In our own study, we did, in fact, see increases in impressions and clicks when our client’s site is featured in the first three AI Overview links.

For example, in one case, we saw a 13.85% increase in impressions and a 5.56% increase in clicks for terms related to “how to change your name in Tennessee”, where our client now appears as the first or second AI Overviews link.

We did, however, see a decrease in impressions when our client’s site was featured below the first three visible AI Overview links. 

For example, our client’s blog post on Nashville fun facts experienced a decrease of 37.42% in impressions in the 4 weeks after the AI Overviews update, but a 2.27% increase in clicks. In this case, the client’s AI Overviews link is featured in the 4th link spot, which is hidden from view unless you click to view more links, which results in less visibility (similar to having to click through to Page 2 in Google’s SERP).

Clicks on AI Overviews vs. Organic Results is Unknown

In both cases, the clients were also still ranked on Page 1 organically both prior to and after the AI Overviews rollout. Unfortunately, what remains a mystery is exactly how many of those impressions and clicks were on the AI Overviews link versus the organic search result below the AI Overviews, which Google does not currently distinguish in Google Search Console.

Our Assumptions

Complex Answers May Lead to More Clicks

Like the impact that featured snippets had on clicks from SERPs, the complexity of the AI summary response likely plays a role in whether more users click on the site links. When a query is answered immediately and completely on the SERP, fewer clicks are likely to result.

That’s nothing new or unexpected. Even before AI Overviews, simple “question and answer” searches, such as “When and where were the last Olympics held?” or “How many ounces are in a cup?”, already resulted in an immediate, complete response in the SERP itself. These responses were typically in the form of a featured snippet or Knowledge Graph. Now, the same types of responses to simple questions often appear in the form of an AI Overview instead of a featured snippet, but the end result — more search impressions, but fewer clicks — is the same.

So, there’s no meaningful change in search impressions and clicks from “question and answer” type search queries before or after AI Overviews. 

More Searches May be Happening on Google Overall

Google claims that there has been an uptik in Google searches overall since the rollout of AI Overviews. Perhaps Google was able to pull some searches away from AI tools, like ChatGPT, and back into Google’s search engine. Or, perhaps it’s just the novelty of the new feature that has more people testing it out. Or maybe people are having to search the same query in multiple ways to get a satisfactory result. No matter the reason, whether this trend continues to hold true, remains to be seen.

The Evolution Will Continue

Already in the short span of time since the launch of AI Overviews, a lot has changed. The number of search results displaying AI Overviews has dropped drastically since its launch, and Google is continuously fine-tuning its system to improve results for users.

We’ll continue monitoring the impact AI Overviews has on search results and our SEO efforts. In the meantime, one thing is for sure: the evolution of AI Overviews is bound to continue. Stay tuned.