How AI Overviews Are Quietly Rewriting the Rules of Search

“Previously, my SEO strategy focused on high-search-volume keywords,” says Sushen Fa Duara, an SEO specialist who, like many of us, used to pine to make it to the top 10 blue links. 

But the introduction of AI Overviews has pivoted his approach. “Instead of just ranking for keywords, I now try to address all user perspectives for a particular topic,” he writes..

For instance, to target a query on “dog protein pills,” he doesn’t simply list the products. He would list benefits, risks, breed-specific needs, vet-approved dosages, and natural alternatives. “By covering these diverse angles, I try to make the content more valuable, informative, and AI-friendly,” says Sushen, who claims the shift has brought him more traffic from large language models (LLM). 

The introduction of AI Overviews, and more recently, AI Mode, has upended search marketing. It isn’t just another SERP feature. Vice President of Buyer Experience at G2, Ross Briggs, suggests that AI Overviews is Google’s direct competitive response to pressure from LLMs like ChatGPT and Perplexity, which he calls "the biggest challenge to Google's ownership of that market share". 

Plus, according to a Semrush report, AI Overviews were triggered for 13.14% by March 2025, a 102% surge in just two months from 6.49% in January. Yet their presence is correlated with a 34.5% lower average clickthrough rate (CTR) for the top-ranking page, according to an Ahrefs study. 

What should be made of the paradoxical, new reality in the world of search? 

Beyond the blue clicks: A new user experience

For years, the battle in search marketing has been for a space above “the fold”. But now the fold itself may have become irrelevant. It’s more about a massive, dynamic, AI-powered block that dominates the user’s first impression.

According to a joint study by Botify and Demand Sphere, when AI Overviews co-occur with featured snippets, which happens 60.5 % of the time, they take up 67.1% of the visual real estate on desktop and 75.5% on mobile phones. This pushes organic links below “the fold”. 

This emergent new Page 1 has understandably sparked fears of a “zero-click” scenario. Yet, a Semrush report has found that zero-click rates for certain terms decreased slightly, from 38.12% to 36.23%. How can CTR fall so dramatically while zero-click rates also dip?

We are experiencing the slow death of the “casual click”. The AIO is acting as a qualification engine. For simple, low-intent, and informational queries, it shares sufficient answers.

And the user journey ends there. This accounts for the drops in CTR.

However, for users seeking answers to a complex, deeper problem, AIO acts as only a primer. It offers them the foundational knowledge to ask better questions or to click more purposefully. This is reinforced by Bing’s Principal Product Manager, Fabrice Canel, in the Botify report, where he says that while clicks may decrease, the "revenue per click will go up" because the user's intent is better understood. 

Google is no longer a directory of links. It is becoming an application unto itself. With AIOs, integrated video carousels, “People Also Ask” boxes, the SERP is becoming a space intended to satisfy the user intent within its own walls. A study has noted that this is contributing to the Walled Garden Effect, a phenomenon that keeps the user within the Google ecosystem. 

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Earlier, you battled only business competitors for attention; now, you’re also competing with Google. 

For a marketer, this means focusing on clicks alone isn’t enough. Your content must be compelling enough to pull a user out of Google’s sticky application. 

The new mechanics of search

This new user experience requires more than acknowledging that SERP has changed. It demands a deeper understanding of the new rules of engagement. If the earlier method solely focused on climbing the ladder of links, the new one is about influencing and managing brand perceptions. 

Below are the ways in which AI Overviews is reshaping search marketing. While these are not definitive, as Google continues to roll out newer innovations, they point to subtle shifts marketers must note and adapt to.

1. The rise of query space 

The keyword is no longer the indispensable unit of SEO. And it’s not dead either. When I explored Google’s patents, it revealed a core mechanism that can be described as “query fan-out”. In it, a single query is extrapolated into a matrix of related questions to capture the user’s total intent. Thus, AIO isn’t just answering the query; it’s answering a web of questions around it. 

BrightEdge has reported that 66% of the URLs cited in AIOs don’t rank in traditional search. This is because they are answering the next anticipated questions, not just the first one asked. I see our job as marketers shifting from winning keywords to building topical authority to become the inevitable source to satisfy the query space.

2. There is a third audience now

We used to write content for humans and search crawlers. Now, we have another audience: AI parsers. They don’t just read for keywords but for meaning, structure, and extractable facts. Content that is structurally summarizable and ready for extraction is becoming more important. 

Headlines, bullet points, concise paragraphs, and the use of semantic SEO and schema markup are no longer mere best practices for UX. They are necessary technical requirements for being understood by generative AI. 

As Abhishek G.P., Vice President of Growth at Atlan, puts it, “It’s no longer about just ranking for keywords or driving traffic. It’s about showing up in the places where AI assistants pull answers from and being seen as a trusted source.” This has changed his team's approach: “We think more like educators and product storytellers than traditional marketers.”  

3. Authenticity via UGC as a ranking factor

A study by Profound found that Reddit is the single largest source of citations for Google AI Overviews, at 21%, with YouTube following at 18.8%. This is a strategic shift that industry leaders are heeding. 

Director of SEO/Organic Search at Zendesk, Jessica Hill, admits that many principles of traditional SEO still apply to generative AI search. Citing the Profound study, she says, “We are strategically exploring how we can utilize these platforms to increase our visibility.”

The sentiment is also echoed by Leandro Perez, Chief Marketing Officer for Australia & New Zealand at Salesforce. “The most persuasive stories today come directly from customers,” he explains. 

“In ANZ, we’re embracing this shift by thinking less like editors and more like catalysts. Rather than sanitising user-generated content (UGC), we amplify it, especially when it reflects the real journey, the unexpected wins, and even the challenges overcome. That’s where authenticity lives, and where buyer trust begins.”

In a previous G2 article, a Google spokesperson told me that their systems aimed to reward "content made to help people, not content made to rank well in search". This holds true even for AI Overviews. The conversational and honest nature of forms provides a trove of experience to adhere to Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines. 

4. The inverted economics of search 

The old search model was about volumes. AI Overviews is turning this model on its head. Semrush research has revealed that, based on conversion rate, the average AI search visitor is 4.4 times as valuable as the average visit from traditional organic search.

This means content creation efforts for AI Overviews must start at the bottom of the funnel. This is because on this platform, the value of a commercial-intent visitor is higher. You can capture fewer but far more valuable leads.

5. The challenge of the ROI black box

There are some platforms that help track traffic from AI Overviews, including Semrush, SEOmonitor, SE Ranking, Conductor, Brightedge, and SeoClarity. Yet the unlinked brand mentions is among the new challenges in measurement, reports Exploding Topics. Another challenge is citations in results, which don’t necessarily mean more clicks. 

An AI platform can recommend your brand, prompting a user to visit your site, yet your analytics will consider only direct or branded search. The true source may remain invisible. 

However, there is "tremendous value of being included in these answers. Both brand mentions and sentiment within the answers, even with no link," says Ross Briggs.

The return-on-investment (ROI) of search marketing is becoming more abstract, perhaps tied to brand influence and sentiment rather than direct clicks, but potentially more impactful on the final sale.

The return-on-investment (ROI) of search marketing is becoming more abstract, perhaps tied to brand influence and sentiment rather than direct clicks, but potentially more impactful on the final sale.

To tackle such problems, Jessica Hill recommends investing in a new data infrastructure that can measure the broader impact of these visibility efforts on actual business outcomes. 

We’re moving toward a time when platforms are going beyond last-click attribution to capture brand lifts, share of voice, and citations within AI. 

6. The collapse of the traditional funnel into the SERP 

AI Overviews is also reshaping the buyer journey. Ross describes the new process as “less searching and less clicking” and more “searching, reading, consuming, and deciding”. I believe this signifies the collapse of the traditional marketing funnel onto the search page. 

 AIO serves the “Awareness” and “Consideration” stages of the funnel by sharing summaries and contexts, without prompting the user to click much. The later stages are when the user is more likely to click, much closer to the “Decision” stage. 

 This means traditional SEO content must be optimized more for a qualified and informed user, as AIOs are already meeting them in the initial phases of the journey.  

7. Brand mentions as the new currency 

The traditional focus on link building as the primary off-page signal is slowly shifting to brand mentions. Andy Crestodina, Chief Marketing Officer of Orbit Media Studios, believes that AIO is prompting marketers to think of brand mentions instead of links. “It is making us think about having a bigger digital footprint and inclusion in all of the directories. Press releases matter more now. Content marketing still matters. Guest blogging is more powerful than before,” he highlights. 

AI models learn about the world through language. So, having your brand mentioned more frequently can be a major way to train AI on your expertise and relevance.

The new mandate: From ranking to influencing

The immediate opportunity in search marketing is what I call “conversation capture.” This means positioning your brand as a solution provider and definitive voice in ongoing dialogues. Smart marketers will, on the one hand, continue to follow the fundamental principle of SEO — creating content useful to users. 

On the other hand, they will abandon the obsession with owning keywords. Instead, they will focus on building brand credibility on conversational threads like Reddit, Discord, and professional fora. These will emerge as the new SEO battlegrounds. 

Brands must develop a mention velocity strategy that prioritizes authentic brand citations. The companies that’ll dominate search will not be those with the biggest SEO budgets and volumes, but those building robust knowledge graphs around expertise. 

The new emergent metrics will be the share of AI citations, sentiment within AI responses, and their influence on decision-making. Companies that can't quantify their AI ecosystem presence may find themselves invisible to the forthcoming generation of buyers who would rarely click through to websites. 

To tap into this new frontier in search marketing, becoming indispensable to AI discovery is the key to survival on SERP. 

Google was contacted for comment, but did not respond by the time of publication. 

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