AI Overviews - Here Is How It Will Affect Your SEO

The organic search industry is buzzing as marketers and web-masters in organic search are starting to see AI Overviews in search engine results pages (SERPs) across Europe and APAC.

This much anticipated update has been on the search industries radar since early 2023, with much uncertainty as to how it will impact anyone who operates their business online.

Initially dubbed Search Generative Experience (SGE), and now AI Overview, Google’s Chat-GPT-styled answer engine has arrived. Here’s what you need to know.

What are AI Overviews?

As the name suggests, it is an answer engine developed by Google, that gathers information from credible sources (read: E-E-A-T) and culminates that information, using an LLM, into a short descriptive answer, citing certain sources in the summary.

They appear at the very top of your SERP, pushing traditional search results even further below the fold. This is often in addition to other SERP features such as Featured Snippets.

What do AI Overviews look like?

Take a look at the example below:

Ignoring the content contained in each SERP feature, users looking for answers to informational queries such as above are now presented with two options to answer their question, without having to click on to a search result listing to get the information.

How will AI Overviews affect your SEO strategy?

In short, it shouldn’t. As your strategy would be focused on providing insightful, authoritative content to your users via a fast, intuitive website experience.

Being featured in an AI Overview would largely be the same as being featured in the Featured Snippet. Google would need to regard your content as the most valuable in terms of E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust), as it determines the information you provide exhibits all of these factors better than your competitors.

However, appearing in an AI Overview would only necessarily benefit your business from a brand awareness standpoint, as the majority of users are getting the information they are after from the SERP, so there would be a reduced volume of traffic to your website for the pages with the informational content.

How will AI Overviews impact your SEO reporting?

Often referred to as zero-click searches, websites ranking for these queries would be getting the search impression, but not the click. So as mentioned above, most owners of websites heavy with informational content may start to see a drop in search visibility and traffic to these types of pages.

This is not necessarily bad for your business, as Google and users would still be directed to your site when intending to make a transaction, hence you will still be generating revenue from product / service inquiries.

How do I know which keywords AI Overviews are appearing in?

AccuRanker detects any AI Overview results for both desktop and mobile searches across a wide range of regions.

Within any group / domain of tracked keywords, users have the ability to filter for them, using SERP Features -> AI Overview

The result is a list of your tracked keywords, where an AI Overview is presented in the SERPs, represented by the ✧ Symbol.

You can validate this with our saved HTML preview of the SERP, clicking the 🔍 at the end of the row.

What is expected from AI Overviews in future?

It is all speculation at this point, but professionals in the industry have seen examples of AI generated product listings pages, which would be a further evolution of product related SERPs of present.

Users searching for mid-to-long tail queries related to products are already presented with the Merchant Centre carousel and many product images interspersed between traditional organic listings. Future iterations could include a variety of products from multiple vendors in a single SERP, akin to a traditional category page on an ecommerce website.

We'll be updating this as AI Overviews evolve with the types of search intent that get impacted and how you can optimise or adjust your strategy to accommodate the changes.