Five Questions about AI’s Impact on SEO and Their Evolving Answers

Search and SEO are evolving rapidly in the wake of new AI options. Many of our clients are concerned about continuing to receive a return on their SEO investment. They worry about putting effort into the right places. And they worry about how to prepare for a drastic shift in the landscape, should it come.

The speed of evolution has made these questions difficult to answer with authority. But we conducted research, asked some experts, and have some theories that put these fears into context. Hopefully, they can help your organization navigate these uncharted waters.

Do AI Overviews reduce click-through rates?

In 2024, Google introduced AI-generated answers to queries in its search results. These “AI Overviews” are more likely to appear when a visitor phrases their search query like a question, using “what,” “how,” or “why” language. These overviews provide citations to their sources and a right sidebar (on laptops) with other references. Some are calling the traffic these overviews generate “zero-click” searches.

While the answer is yes, click-through rates have reduced by as much as 10%, others argue that most websites will be unaffected. For one, Google initially scaled back its AI Overviews to a small fraction of its billions of daily searches. Coverage has grown steadily since - Conductor’s analysis puts AI Overviews on roughly a quarter of queries, and nearly half in healthcare - but the perception that they are everywhere is still overblown.

Further, the same article goes on to assert that 96.5% of all AI Overviews appear for informational keywords - meaning very few overviews are created for transactional, navigational, and local searches. Informational questions are much easier and safer for AI to answer and will likely remain the dominant use case.

Others argue that AI Overviews keep low-performing traffic away from your site. For many years, Google has already been answering queries with information cards. When you Google a business, you are likely to get a card with the business name, phone number, web address, and even a map with their location. Popular businesses might include reviews and specific details like daily open hours. These information cards have already been taking traffic away from your site. But was that the traffic that you wanted?

These folks argue, if the searcher just wanted to know an answer to a question they had while having a conversation with a friend, they would have come to your site for that information and then left. Their visit would have counted as a bounce and negatively affected your monthly traffic data. Same with the ones that just needed a phone number or wanted to know what time you close. They would have come to your website for that one thing and then left.

Google’s own research says that when people use AI Overviews to start understanding a topic, they end up searching more frequently and express higher satisfaction with the results. Their position is that these overviews scratch the surface and help visitors ask more in-depth follow-up questions. Other recent studies have found that click-through increased for companies featured in AI Overviews, while those without an AI Overview lost traffic.

One thing is for sure: AI Overviews’ prominent position at the top of the results have pushed down organic results and made it harder for high-ranking organic websites to get noticed.

Takeaway:

Mixed. Yes, it is possible that AI Overviews are preventing click-through. It is also possible this traffic was not going to convert. And depending on your product and position in the market, AI Overviews might drive slightly more traffic than organic search. Either way, the result is an even more competitive search landscape than before.

Should I optimize my content for AI Overviews?

The most obvious next question is “How can my brand rank for AI Overviews?” While this is an important question, remember that AI Overviews often include citations from multiple sources. So while your business may rank for an overview, it is likely not going to be alone.

The answer to this question is more of the same things you should already know. In order to rank highly, you should: - Follow SEO best practices - Be authentic (draw on first-hand experiences like anecdotes, reference data sources, and be as unique as possible with your perspective) - Anticipate next steps (what does someone need to learn and in which order) - Use structured data (schema, JSON, etc.) - Include multimedia (images, video, gifs)

Lots of SEO companies want to help your business rank, and AI Overviews is the next frontier. But from all the articles we have reviewed (and there were many), the same best practices apply - there are no shortcuts to great content.

Takeaway

Yes, optimize your content for AI Overviews, but this does not mean you need to do more than what you are already doing. To be a highly quoted source within your industry has benefits for brand recognition and trust, but just like long-tail keywords, these searches may have low volume. In the end, it is an investment vs. return question. There is a significant overlap between the sources cited in AI Overviews and the top organic search results, therefore, if your site already ranks well, you can’t do much more to get into an AI Overview.

Should I continue investing in SEO for Google?

Some clients worry that Google will be unseated as the dominant search engine now that tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT have seen an explosion of millions of users. These tools are indeed experiencing hockey-stick growth, and the gap is closing fast: when SparkToro crunched the numbers in March 2025, Google received 373 times more searches than ChatGPT; by Ahrefs’ analysis in February 2026, ChatGPT’s search-like queries had grown to about 12% of Google’s search volume, passing Bing to become the second-largest search platform.

But query volume is only half the question. The other half is where the visits go. Google handles roughly 13.7 billion searches per day - the company says more than 5 trillion a year - and OpenAI’s own research puts ChatGPT at 2.5 billion daily messages, only about a quarter of which are seeking information. The same Ahrefs study found Google sends about 190 times more traffic to websites than ChatGPT: ChatGPT mostly answers in place, while Google still hands the visitor on to you.

Things keep changing, of course. But AI tools are not used only for search, and they suffer from not being the default tool at hand, which for most people is a web browser. Google remains synonymous with search for a large percent of the population.

Takeaway

Yes, continue to invest in SEO for Google specifically. ChatGPT is growing fast enough that it can no longer be ignored, but as a source of actual visits to your website, Google is still the market.

If we don’t implement structured data, are we losing out on AI crawler traffic?

Structured data is great for all SEO, so actually, you should implement structured data like Schema.org for across-the-board SEO value.

If you inject structured data through Google Tag Manager (GTM), it renders client-side: Googlebot executes the JavaScript and sees the JSON-LD, but most other crawlers never do. If the data existed server-side, other bots could access it.

Most non-Google robot crawlers do not execute Javascript, therefore, they miss out on anything rendered in the browser. These crawlers include Bing, Yahoo, ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. So again, server-side structured data would benefit all the search engine crawlers that are not Google.

But do LLMs really need structured data?

Large Language Models (LLMs) use statistical analysis to predict what word will follow the previous set of words. They do not understand language as much as they can mathematically reproduce its patterns. Therefore, they create structure from unstructured data all the time.

But while LLMs process and understand unstructured text, providing structured data would significantly help interpret and categorize your content effectively and accurately.

Takeaway

The short answer is no, LLMs do not require structured data to create meaningful connections between content and search intent. But structured data would help them and any other search service to correctly label, tag, and organize your data. The longer answer is an investment in structured metadata would pay off in dividends for all search engines and crawlers.

How can we prepare for SEO’s evolving future?

In mid-2024, when Google first introduced AI Overviews, some in the SEO/SERP industry claimed sites could lose up to 25% of their traffic. That has not come to pass, with some sites reporting as high as 12% and others lows of 8.9% and 2.6% - not insignificant, but lower than expected. And the data is still coming in, with others reporting increases in traffic with specific kinds of intent.

While AI increasingly shapes search results, content strategy will need to shift for sites to remain visible and relevant. High-quality, authoritative, and authentic content that offers depth, accuracy, and unique insights is still valuable currency. AI algorithms are designed to identify and prioritize quality, trustworthy, and well-researched content for inclusion in their summaries.

Sites should continue to target long-tail and question-based keywords to align content with visitor’s increase in natural language queries. This type of content is often more challenging for AI to fully synthesize and may still necessitate user click-through for a comprehensive understanding. Going deeper to investigate specific intents behind longer conversational queries could also be crucial for attracting relevant traffic.

Finally, diversifying content formats by incorporating video, infographics, and interactive elements will continue to enhance engagement and provide unique value that text-based AI summaries don’t fully replicate. And optimizing content for featured snippets remains important, as appearing in these snippets increases the likelihood of a website’s content being cited within AI Overviews.

Takeaway

The fundamentals of great content and best-practice SEO have not changed as dramatically as the tools that crawl your site and serve your content have.

Final Thoughts

Anything in the tech space evolves rapidly, and SEO is no exception. While the methods and the tools we use might change, the fundamentals remain strong. Keep doing what you have been doing, keep being curious, and keep asking these important questions of those in your circle whom you trust. We’re all figuring these things out in real time and can benefit from each other’s expertise.

If you have in-depth questions about SEO, content management, and the evolving AI-powered landscape, reach out to our team and we’ll always do our best to answer them thoughtfully and from multiple angles.

AI disclaimer: Google’s Deep Research was used for initial exploration and source gathering. All sources cited in this article were reviewed by the author. ChatGPT was used for follow up questions, as well as AI Overviews for examples of common questions. This article synthesizes these sources and was written by a human.