AI Searchwebsite SEOWebsite Traffic
• 5 min read
Google is all in on AI in its search results. For marketers who have long leaned on SEO best practices to show up in front of internet users, the old rules no longer apply.
“The guidelines that people were publishing even a year ago may not be relevant that much longer,” Simon Poulton, EVP of innovation and growth at the agency Tinuiti, told Marketing Brew.
Google users who are served AI-generated overviews at the top of their search results clicked on search-result links significantly less often than users who did not encounter AI summaries, according to a Pew Research Center report released in July. This shift, in which Google has essentially cut off search traffic to third-party sites, has been coined “Google Zero” and is upending search and creating some major challenges for brands that have used SEO as a way to drive traffic and maintain engagement.
As a result, SEO marketers find themselves looking to engineer new ways to keep users engaged and revisit what metrics are best in a new era of search.
“The entire industry is going through a relearning process right now,” Poulton said.
Google’s AI Overviews, powered by its GenAI model Gemini, first rolled out widely in the US in May 2024, providing AI-generated summaries pulled from news articles or other sources on the web. While AI Overviews appeared on only 6.49% of Google searches in January, by May they showed up on nearly one-fifth of them, according to data compiled by the marketing platform Semrush.
That has had a considerable effect on web traffic for all kinds of sites, including publishers. At Business Insider, traffic dropped 55% from April 2022 to April 2025, according to Similarweb data cited by the Wall Street Journal; the “extreme traffic drops,” according to CEO Barbara Peng, were the impetus behind a significant staff cut in May, when the company laid off around 20% of its workforce. At the time, Peng also said the publication was committed to going “all-in on AI.” (Business Insider’s parent company, Insider Inc., is a subsidiary of Axel Springer, the same company that owns Morning Brew.)
Those traffic drops are also affecting brands that rely on search traffic to help drive their businesses. At agency Mediassociates, clients in verticals like healthcare and financial have seen drops in their organic traffic anywhere from 20% to 50% since May 2024, Tim Lathrop, VP, platform digital, said. For now, he said, the agency is advising clients to lean on paid search to complement organic search results.
Poulton echoed this sentiment, noting that there could be a convergence of paid media and organic media, which were once seen as separate.
“Organic is going to be influencing the future of paid and the quality of those experiences, because ultimately, Google’s going to try and drive what gets revenue, and it’s going to be the most related ad to the answer, not the query.”
For marketers looking to improve their SEO results amid the shift to AI Overviews, there are a few strategies that experts recommend. It may be helpful for brands to refresh the content on their website more often—Lathrop suggested at least once a month—and adjust content based on the information people are currently looking for, encouraging users to click through to their sites.
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Lathrop also recommended that brands continue building or strengthening their structured data, which Google Search uses to understand the content of a page and can lead to improved search results. If a web page has a recipe listed on it, for example, providing more detailed information, like ingredients and cooking time, can make it more likely that users will click on the link while also making it easier for Google to understand the content on the page.
These existing SEO best practices can be useful for sites seeking good positioning in Google Search results, but also in its AI features, according to a Google Search Central post.
The AI Overview presents the real estate that may be the new frontier for SEO marketers to lay claim to, as brands look to appear in those overviews and provide guidance to users on specific products or services. Poulton predicts that future SEO marketing will focus more on driving overall awareness of a brand or product (what he called “influence and sentiment”) rather than “clicks and rankings.”
“That’s what the future of SEO is. It’s not ‘black hat’ or ‘white hat,’” he said. “It’s purely ‘How do we influence opinion with multiple types of information,’ be it reviews, be it content we’ve created, be it what other folks have said.”
As SEO marketers look to master AI Overviews, there are still yet other challenges Google’s AI may present. For example, the content Google generates in an AI Overview may not always be suitable for a brand—especially if it suggests information that could lead consumers to develop a negative opinion of a brand, Poulton said.
Another challenge is measurement. Some users prefer to read the AI Overview instead of directly clicking on a search result, and measurement platforms are still evolving to gauge web performance with fewer users directly clicking through, Lathrop said.
“In the past, you’d be able to look at clicks to your website and [use]…analytics to understand the engagement of content,” he said. “Now we’re in this era of basically zero-click advertising and just zero-click in general, where people are just reading [the AI overview]…versus clicking and engaging.”
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