What are AI Overviews?

AI Overviews embed generative AI in search results to construct a response to the user’s query. The aim is to provide a quick answer to a question or a summary of the results - meeting the user’s needs without them ever having to visit a website. As of April 2025, they look a little something like this:

Note that there are some links to website articles.

It is! And sometimes, it isn’t. If you’ve played around with tools like Google Gemini or ChatGPT at all, you’ll know that these large language models sometimes make mistakes. I personally don’t have a whole lot of trust in the content provided by AI Overviews at the moment, although it’s likely to get better over time.

That isn’t just my opinion either. Studies such as this one show that generative AI often makes mistakes, and they’re bad at saying if they don't have a good answer to a question.

There absolutely was. We used to have ‘boxed results’ near the top of the results, which we called ‘position zero’. The difference there was that they featured a direct quote from a website with a link to it, rather than something generated by AI from a number of sources.

Here’s an example we got for one of our clients in 2019:

At the moment, AI Overviews are mainly appearing for informational searches. By that I mean, questions or general searches without any transactional intent.

For example:

If I search for something more transactional, where the intent is to buy something, I don’t get the overview. In this case, we have Shopping results, followed by a Search ad.

There’s some grey area as well though. I’ve seen some results where there are shopping listings with an AI Overview underneath.

It’s likely that AI Overviews will roll out to a wider variety of searches over time - Google have said as much. At the moment, they appear for about 30% of searches (according to research by Authoritas).

It’s hard to say how it will change things in the long term, but we’re already seeing some patterns. A big one is the rise in ‘zero-click searches’. Those are searches where the user gets their answer from the SERP, and then leaves – rather than clicking through to view a website.

A lot of people seem concerned about this – and it does seem to be impacting traffic for some of our clients – but as overviews are more common for informational searches currently, it isn’t a huge concern. Yet.

The AI Overview box also pushes everything else down, so being position one might no longer guarantee that you’ll appear above the fold - resulting in less visibility.

Another issue is that rank tracking tools like Semrush are starting to include AI Overview listings in their calculations. Previously, they would show a keyword showing in the main ten organic spots on the first results page as positions 1 to 10, with 1 being the top result. However, they’re now also showing mentions in the AI Overview as position 1. That’s pretty confusing - even though they’re marking those results with a special symbol in their interface.

It’s unclear how much traffic being in the AI Overview generates, and it probably depends if you’re one of the first sites listed in that section or not.

If anyone claims to have all the answers, well… they don’t. Things are evolving quickly, and it’s difficult to see very far ahead!

I haven’t seen many articles talking about this, but it’s worth noting that the AI Overview sometimes appears at the top of the organic results, but sometimes it will also appear above the ads that are on the page as well!

That pushes the ads further down the page, which could potentially impact clickthrough rates and therefore traffic generated by your ads. It’s likely Google is still testing this. If there’s a big impact on clicks (and therefore their ad revenue) they’ll probably change it.

In the long term, I’d expect the impact on Google Ads to be minimal.

Optimising for generative search goes beyond AI Overviews themselves, although it’s likely in either case that the best practices for SEO will also largely apply here - whether it’s called Generative Search Optimisation (GSO), Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), AI Search Optimisation (ASO) or something else

As far as AI Overview SEO is concerned, it’s very similar to how we would optimise for ‘position zero’ results back in the late 2010’s. As the overviews are appearing mostly for informational and question-based searches, writing content that answers those questions is a great strategy.

It also seems like the things we’d do anyway as part of an SEO strategy also work - like creating helpful content that’s well-written and that includes relevant keywords. Google themselves have said there’s nothing special you need to do – although it’s worth noting that they’ve not been entirely truthful about SEO factors in the past!

As we learn more about SEO for AI Overviews, we’ll be sure to let you know.