hink back to the last time you went looking for some answers.
Maybe you needed a dog-friendly restaurant for your company party. Maybe you couldn’t quite remember how many teaspoons were in a tablespoon (it’s still three).
Whatever the question, one thing is clear: Google has the answer.
And for most queries submitted to the search engine, it has many. The page that appears after clicking return is what search engine optimization professionals refer to as the SERP, or search engine results page. How, where, and when your business shows up on the SERP can have a major impact on its ability to drive website traffic, gain new customers, and increase revenue.
These pages, coupled with the complex strategies involved in ranking higher on them, serve as the focal point of search engine optimization (SEO); they’re an undeniable snapshot at just how well your brand is faring with Google’s algorithm.
But with Google’s latest search feature, things are starting to look a little different.
In the experimental feature powered by Google’s own large language model, Gemini, certain queries would occasionally return an AI-generated response prior to organic or sponsored results. Some of the text-based generations were sound; others suffered from hallucinations or misinformation.
In May 2024, Google confirmed its latest product officially left the testing phase, rolling out to US markets with a plan of global expansion by end of year. With the announcement, a new name: AI Overviews.
“It was definitely top of mind even back last year,” says Jackson Hille, SEO Director of 6sense, an account-based marketing platform and sales intelligence software. “Within the executive ranks, there was already an inclination of AI’s potential to change how Google presents search moving forward and how we might need to adapt our website, our content, or our expectations in terms of how much demand we’re going to see through organic traffic.”
Apart from misinformation, the SEO community’s primary concern with AI Overviews centers around visibility: will users handed a well-crafted AI-generated response simply end their search without clicking through to the website content that helped create it?
Experts suggest it has been a mixed bag—and in Hille’s experience, it might be too early to tell.
6sense competes in the business-to-business contact data space. The company has a variety of website content focused on technographic and firmographic pages about certain companies and their market share. Regarding searches related to this type of content, Hille says that his company’s organic traffic numbers have remained relatively static since the introduction of AI Overviews.
“If someone is online and searching for ‘adobe market share’ in the AI Overview, we are appearing as one of the top listed sources. We’re also the featured snippet,” says Hille, noting that appearing as Google’s featured snippet was previously SERP’s highest honor.
“And then we’re also in the traditional organic search results. So we’re appearing three different times within the span of one and a half scrolls. And I think the anticipated result of that is you would think we’d get a surge of traffic, but what I’ve seen in the data is that it just really hasn’t done anything.”
Because Google has yet to add any tracking component for AI Overviews in the Google Search Console—which is the main interface to understand how Google perceives a site’s technical aspects—it’s difficult to draw any concrete conclusions.
To further muddy the waters, the frequency of AI Overviews in search results has SEO professionals scratching their heads. AI Overviews only trigger in specific circumstances, and a recent article from Search Engine Land suggests the instances are only decreasing, as low as 7 percent for all searches in June.
But not everyone’s experience has been so neutral.
Her team primarily serves clients in mental health, and Christensen says they’ve seen a significant effect on organic traffic numbers over the last couple months.
“May was the big drop-off point, and we’ve seen a lot of other companies in our industry having pretty massive drops in organic search traffic,” says Christensen. “We’ve also seen some dips, but how we’ve compensated for that—and why a lot of our clients are still doing super well in the SEO world—is because we’ve basically changed our entire content plan and strategy.”
Christensen says Beacon found success by shifting strategy from in-depth, long form content to creating content that addresses users’ queries more efficiently. Her team started implementing this approach more than a year ago. “And I think this makes for a better search experience in general,” she adds.
Christensen is also careful to make the distinction between AI Overviews’ impact when it comes to local and national search intent.
United Kingdom-based digital marketing consultant Azeem Ahmad would agree.
“Generally, if you want something near you, you will still get something near you in the results. I don’t see it having much of a noticeable change on local SEO,” says Ahmad, whose boutique consultancy Azeem Digital serves a variety of clients in diverse industries.
“We’ve certainly seen traffic numbers decrease on the national or global side, but it’s hard to attribute that directly to AI Overviews,” he says. “The industry has moved away from the model where somebody has a need, they search for it, and the need is satisfied. Nowadays, consumers are much more savvy, happy to look elsewhere, and happy to take the time to make a more informed decision.”
Ahmad says there are still a number of question marks lingering over the new feature.
“I still think it’s having some teething problems, but I’m pleasantly surprised that it has moved away from this era of misinformation and all of the things that we’ve seen going viral because of that. But would I have released it to the public in the current state that it’s in? Probably not.”
“SEO has been dying for what, twenty years now?” Ahmad says with a laugh.
As long as the industry has been around, SEO professionals have endured an overblown struggle for relevance. Every few years, a new software or core update to Google’s algorithm seems to spell the practice’s swift and certain demise. In the context of large language models, that cycle is simply heightened.
“I’ve always been a big advocate of the fact that, if you stand still, you’ll be left behind in this industry,” says Ahmad. “And I think the best SEOs will approach new features with an inquisitive mind rather than, ‘Is this going to take my job?’”
The initial reaction to AI Overviews could be another false alarm in the brief history of SEO. And though it seems to have affected some verticals sectors more than others, there’s no question that the practice—and the digital marketing landscape at large—is changing. In many ways, for the better.
“One of the things I’m a big fan of and pleased to see growing is that more and more people are jumping on the train of content diversification,” says Ahmad. “People are now seeing the benefits of turning a blog post into a podcast, or into Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts. So those people who are building newsletters or sharing their content across multiple platforms—they’re the ones who are seeing massive growth right now.”
But there’s a method to the madness, Ahmad warns.
“I’m seeing people on almost every channel but with more useful stuff; It doesn’t strike me as the scattergun approach. People are now taking the time to create content specific for the platform: strong openings on TikTok with big hooks to keep viewers in place, longer form content on YouTube broken down so people can skip to relevant chapters, podcasts with hooks and teasers that drive people back to blog posts. I’m even seeing it used in paid social,” says Ahmad, who is careful to point out that it isn’t just blog or plain text content that appears on the SERP.
“So if there’s any good that’s coming out of certain platforms ‘dying’, it’s the idea that people are now learning to diversify their output.”
These are the tactics SEOs have traditionally used to rank favorably in SERP. But for as long as SEO has been a practice, certain players have aimed to beat the algorithm by using ranking tactics that are, at best, frowned upon.
Christensen offers the example of a business with multiple websites that all link to each other. “You give Google’s algorithm the impression that your content has a bunch of domain authority, but it’s all fake,” she says.
SEO experts call this a “black hat” strategy, but according to Christensen these unsavory techniques could soon be a thing of the past.
Prior to Google’s official rollout of AI Overviews, the tech giant completed its biggest ever core update, which lasted a whopping forty-five days and reduced low-effort or unhelpful search results by up to 40 percent.
Christensen says this update was a breath of fresh air.
“This latest update just completely wiped those guys out,” she says of parties who dabble in the dark art. “There’s just no way to really fool the system anymore, and that’s been trending this way for a long time: the cream is rising to the top, and people who have really been pushing best practices over the last decade are the ones coming out ahead.”
Producing content within the E-E-A-T framework (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) is another industry best practice, something Google has been preaching for years.
So Christensen was surprised in March when a Google leak revealing 14,000 different ranking factors didn’t contain a single mention of E-E-A-T. “Even Google was saying ‘Hey, this is how we’re going to view the credibility of content coming forward,’ and when the leak came out there was very little talk about E-E-A-T, almost like it wasn’t really a ranking factor at all.”
“This means they’ve figured out a way to algorithmically score a page based on how much effort it took to create—and that goes beyond just plain text,” says Hille. “To me, that is the most salient thing to latch onto moving forward.”
“If there are twenty different pieces of content on a topic that are all roughly the same 2,000 words—and now there’s also an AI Overview summarizing those—If I’m the user and I’ve already taken that next step beyond the AI Overview to go to someone’s website, then I probably want to hear and see some additional or unique perspective.”
“The way I think about building content moving forward is from the unique selling point of any specialist in your company.” Hille uses the example of pulling in his product marketing team to supplement text content with screenshots, or his public relations team for live webinars or podcast snippets.
“That’s all stuff we have that nobody else has—and adding that to your content seems like a winning thing.”
For instance, Hille notes Google’s rumored interest in acquiring HubSpot, maker of marketing, sales, and customer service software. Hille observes, “To me, that’s a little bit of a sign they know that they’re going to have to compete more on the internal process part of web marketers’ jobs than before.”
In fact, shortly after the interview with Hille, Google introduced a new feature to its Search Console called “Recommendations,” which tracks with Hille’s prediction that Google will have to compete more on those internal processes than it did previously.
Kudos to Hille, who believes this and other changes could lead to Google’s revenue mix looking quite different over the next few years.
“What I imagine could happen with Google Search Console is that they probably want to evolve it to compete with the SEO tools that exist on the market,” he says, pointing to popular tools like Semrush and Ahrefs that SEO experts call on to aid in a variety of tasks from keyword planning to competitive analyses.
Therefore, Hille concludes, “If they want to protect their market share, they’re going to have to be more influential on how companies run and market their websites.”