Of all the many changes Google has rolled out or tried in select markets recently, the one that everyone, both technical professionals and basic internet users, seem to know about are the AI Overviews.
What are AI Overviews?
AI Overviews are the small blurb that appears at the top of the Google search engine more often these days, with almost 14% of all searches triggering the Overviews as of March 2025, up from just 6% two months before.
The goal of these overviews is to gather relevant information to the search being done, and have it compiled in a single place for the searcher. After a rocky rollout, where the AI Overviews suggested things like putting glue on pizza, Google seems to have settled on pushing the overviews to appear mostly for low-risk and fact-based queries.
Now, as this Google tool has begun to settle and become the norm on the search engine result pages (SERPs) one thing has become clear – while the AI Overviews are becoming more accurate and helpful, clicks on individual sites have gone down, and that is a worrisome trend for businesses and marketers alike, especially those whose main tactic is Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Google has heard this concern, and started incorporating citations to these overviews, to show where they got this information. So if a bizarre response like how many rocks you can eat to remain healthy appears again, the searcher will see the site this information came from, and use their best judgement to determine that it was a satirical joke by the site owners, not a true fact.
For this reason, these citations help those who are quoted continue to get clicks to their website, and on average don’t see as much of a decline in their site’s click through rate (CTR).
Solutions
Digital marketing has always been about adapting to the newest technology, and Google’s AI Overviews are no different. The simplest answer to still being seen and clicked on by searchers is to be cited for the overview, and to do that, your site must have, as Google has been referring to it, ‘helpful content.’
But what is ‘helpful content’ and how do you incorporate it into your site in a way Google will recognize? This can seem like a daunting task, especially on top of running your business, but that’s where our team comes in! Schedule a consultation with our experts to go over your business, goals and current strategies, and we’ll work together to organically get you onto Google’s first page and beyond. Contact us to learn more!
