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Large AI Overviews on SERPs are affecting visibility and causing a dramatic decrease in traffic.
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Large AI Overviews on SERPs are affecting visibility and causing a dramatic decrease in traffic.
Stay ahead of the SEO game with insights on adapting your strategy to AI-driven SERPs and the latest Google updates.
This post was sponsored by Bright Data. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.
Struggling to adapt your SEO strategy to ever-changing AI-driven SERPs?
Have the most recent Google updates left your rank-tracking methods outdated?
What happens when you can no longer deliver key information on traffic sources?
Generative AI (GenAI) technologies like Google Gemini and Bard are reshaping search results.
This is creating unprecedented challenges, especially when it comes to the elephant in the room: “The New Position 0.”
In this article, we’ll help tackle the key ways to:
Just this week, Google rolled out unexpected changes to SERP structures, causing widespread disruptions for many SEO strategies that rely on SERP rankings.
These updates led to outages and inaccurate data across the industry, forcing many businesses to quickly adapt to avoid prolonged disruptions.
“The disruptions caused by Google’s latest SERP changes left many platforms unable to deliver accurate data to their users. Our clients, however, were unaffected thanks to our immediate response and robust infrastructure. If not for the media and search community, they wouldn’t have known there were any changes.” – Ariel Shulman, VP Product at Bright Data
Generative AI has fundamentally altered how search engines deliver results.
Classic SERP features have become central to understanding user intent and the user journey.
Until now.
The SERP layout we know and love has changed.
These overall changes present challenges for rank-tracking platforms tasked with capturing and analyzing SERPs:
The challenge for rank-tracking platforms is clear: adapt to these AI-driven shifts or risk leaving users without the insights they need to thrive.
Position 0 on Google refers to any of the featured snippets that appear at the very top of the search engine results page (SERP), above all organic search results.
It’s a special box that highlights concise information in response to a query, often in the form of a paragraph, list, or table.
For example, if you search for “How to tie a tie,” the featured snippet might display step-by-step instructions directly at the top. Being in Position 0 can boost your SEO strategy significantly since it’s considered premium real estate in search rankings.
The featured snippet is designed to provide users with quick answers to their questions without requiring them to click on a website. It’s highly coveted by website owners because it significantly increases visibility and click-through rates.
However, it’s becoming more difficult to track what is ranking in position 0 due to 5 different issues that baffle the current MarTech stack.
So, let’s dive deeper: What did Google change that you’ll need to change?
As we’re seeing in real-time, AI technologies like Google Gemini (previously Bard) and Microsoft’s Bing AI are reshaping SERP layouts.
So far, SERP structures are evolving rapidly with AI updates.
Elements like conversational answers or rich media snippets appear inconsistently, requiring you to constantly adapt your SEO strategy and data collection methods.
Instead of seeing Google Ads placements, featured snippets, positions 1-3, and People Also Ask, we’ll now be seeing:
However, this is not its final state. The new layout of SERPs is dynamic; it will continue to change, and you have to be ready.
With position 1 pushed down at least 3 scroll lengths, this is no longer the top clicked result.
Additionally, the layout of a searcher’s query will also vary based on new advances in SERP personalization.
Now, clicks are possible in many new locations on the SERP, such as in a cited link for Google’s AI Overview (AIO).
These are not as easily trackable nor attributable.
SEO analysts and SEO strategists will see a massive impact on their traffic data and how they optimize their content to display above the fold.
Finally, position 1 on Google SERPs has seen its decline from providing at least 33% of organic search clicks to just 11% as of January 2025 depending on the search term.
Organic CTR declined ~70% when an AIO was present on the SERP.
AIO not only makes it difficult to obtain clicks, but one final change has made it nearly impossible to attribute clicks to positions.
In short:
What does this mean?
Google AIO and other dynamic SERP features are the new Position Zero.
Many SERP elements, especially those influenced by AI, load dynamically based on user interaction.
As we know from past SEO knowledge, dynamic and lazy-loading content cannot be seen by bots and scrapers until something triggers the content to load.
Therefore, to retrieve all the necessary data, you’ll need to simulate interactions like clicks and scrolls, which adds complexity and latency.
As you can see so far, dynamic and personalized search results are more prominent.
Your favorite SEO keyword research and rank-tracking tools rely on bots to crawl the web for key data to help you build your SEO strategy.
However, Google has removed a large piece that makes that data scraping possible: bots.
Google’s evolving anti-bot measures further complicate real-time data collection, pushing platforms to the brink of what their systems can handle.
Sophisticated anti-bot defenses, such as CAPTCHA challenges, IP-based blocking, and JavaScript obfuscation, make real-time data collection a significant hurdle. Many traditional scraping tools cannot meet these challenges.
Control data is something that remains the same from one experiment to another. It enables you to have direct comparisons to build conclusions from when you’re building your SEO strategy.
The old SERP’s control data was the standardized layout. SERP layouts and results were similar enough for the same search query, meaning you could compare multiple searches for the same query to create conclusions that drove your strategy.
Now, user-specific factors like location, language, and device type create unique SERP views with vastly different orders of results.
It’s no longer simple to look at SERP data for [What is a 5-star hotel?] and know which link was clicked from which position:
Capturing this variability at scale while maintaining accuracy is critical yet immensely difficult.
AI-generated responses are constantly updated, with position-zero content shifting based on new data and context.
These AI-generated responses are part of an evolution of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) called Answer Engine Optimization (AEO).
You’ll need tools that have been updated to extract data from Answer Engines in real-time.
To regain your lost traffic, you’ll need to refer to more sophisticated tools to gain access to new SERP data streams to inform your organic traffic strategy.
Tools that previously helped you understand your position on SERPs are now outdated.
Rank-tracking platforms that have upgraded should be ready and able to collect data using more modern sources that align with the roadblocks above.
These tools don’t just need to collect data, they need to deliver actionable insights to help their users optimize for “The New Position 0” based on the data and AIO’s best practices. By extracting the right data and presenting it clearly, platforms empower users to improve their strategies effectively.
Here’s how platforms are leveraging Data from GenAI results:
Platforms will need insights into which content types (e.g., FAQs, schema markup, and structured data) are prioritized by AI-driven search engines. This will help their users create concise, authoritative content that aligns with SERP preferences, improving visibility and relevance in position zero.
They will need metrics such as click-through rates (CTR), impressions, and engagement specific to position zero. These metrics will help their users monitor performance and refine their strategies to maintain or improve their rankings.
Platforms will need geo-targeted and device-specific data to provide segmented insights. This will help their users tailor their optimization efforts to specific regions, languages, or devices, ensuring their strategies are more precise and effective.
They will need data on conversational and intent-driven search queries. This will help their users align their content with how large language models prioritize conversational patterns, resulting in higher engagement and relevance.
SEO tools using Bright Data’s toolkit have access to all this data in real-time and at scale. That’s why the leading SEO tools choose Bright Data as their go-to data provider. Platforms leveraging these insights position themselves as indispensable tools for helping their users dominate “The New Position 0.”
As “The New Position 0” continues to redefine search, rank-tracking platforms face mounting challenges in delivering accurate, actionable data. Choosing the right data collection partner is no longer optional, it’s the key to staying ahead. Platforms leveraging Bright Data’s SERP API are equipped to meet these challenges, empowering their users to succeed in an AI-driven search landscape.
Bright Data’s proactive approach meant their clients experienced uninterrupted services during the disruptions that affected many in the industry. SEO tools leveraging Bright Data’s SERP API maintained seamless operations, continuing to deliver accurate, real-time insights to their users without issue.
Integrating your platform with Bright Data’s SERP API is quick and straightforward. Want to see what it’s all about? Check out the documentation here or test it out in the SERP API playground to see if it’s the perfect match for your SEO tool. When data matters, companies choose Bright Data.
This article has been sponsored by Bright Data, and the views presented herein represent the sponsor’s perspective.
Image Credits
Featured Image: Image by Bright Data. Used with permission.
Bright Data is the world’s leading web data platform, powering the top search marketing platforms with real-time, localized SERP data …
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