AI Overviews are quietly rewriting how people use Google—and for a lot of businesses, that means more impressions, fewer clicks, and a very different marketing game. Here’s what’s really happening and how to respond.
Loading…
Playbooks on AI and Web3 product marketing, GTM and distribution. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.
Written by Kevan Shah, Web3 and AI product marketing strategist and founder of Hangryfeed.
Head of BD at Zealy and growth operator with 8+ years experience helping AI and Web3 products raise $26M+, scale to $2.2B monthly DeFi volume, and reach 1.2M+ users.
You’re staring at your analytics on a Monday morning.
Impressions are up. Keywords look healthy. Positions haven’t cratered. But the one number that actually matters—the clicks that turn into leads, trials, or revenue—is sliding the wrong way.
At first you blame seasonality. Then a core update. Then a new competitor.
Eventually, you search a few of your top queries in an incognito window and see it: a big AI-generated answer block at the top of the page. Your content is cited. Your logo might even be peeking out. But to get to your actual site, users now have to scroll past a full, “good enough” answer.
Nothing broke in your SEO. The playing field changed.
This is the quiet tension behind hundreds of similar stories: Google’s AI Overviews are soaking up user intent, leaving brands with visibility but far fewer clicks.
Let’s unpack what’s really going on, why people disagree about how bad it is, and what practical steps founders and marketers can take now.
For years, marketers adjusted to featured snippets, knowledge panels, and people-also-ask boxes. But AI Overviews are a different kind of hit.
At their core, they do two things:
For “how to” and “what is” searches, many users now get everything they need without clicking anywhere. The behavior that used to drive whole content strategies—search, skim, click a promising result—is being replaced by “search, skim the AI answer, and move on.”
That’s where the numbers get painful.
The specifics vary by business, but the pattern is consistent: more in-SERP exposure, fewer visits to your site.
The impact isn’t evenly distributed. That’s part of why this topic is so polarizing.
You see roughly three camps emerging:
“Google is cannibalizing the web”
This group sees AI Overviews as an existential problem.
“It’s not just AI—your SEO is slipping”
Another camp argues that AI Overviews are only part of the story, and sometimes a convenient scapegoat.
They point to:
In their view, not every traffic dip is an AI problem. Some sites simply lost ground, and it’s easy to blame the shiny new feature at the top of the SERP.
“This is evolution—adapt your strategy”
The third group accepts the reality: AI Overviews are here, Google shows no sign of rolling them back, and arguing about fairness doesn’t move a pipeline.
Instead, they ask:
This mindset doesn’t minimize the pain. It just focuses on control.
One of the strangest side effects of AI Overviews is the mismatch between what your tools tell you and what your business feels.
A common pattern looks like this:
One SEO described this as the worst click-through rate they’d ever seen, and they’re not alone. Being “featured” in the answer sounds great until you realize the vast majority of people never leave the search page.
That leaves a tough question:
Is that exposure worth anything if users don’t click?
Some marketers argue yes:
Others are more skeptical:
Both perspectives are understandable. Practically, it means you can’t treat AI Overviews like another acquisition channel with clean, trackable ROI. Right now, the metrics simply aren’t there.
If you run SaaS, especially B2B, this likely feels personal.
For the past decade, the playbook has been:
AI Overviews hit that exact layer of the funnel:
Those are the queries where AI is most aggressive, and where research suggests CTR can be cut roughly in half when AI answers appear.
When that happens:
Meanwhile, bottom-of-funnel queries—“[Your brand] pricing”, “[Your brand] vs [competitor]”, “best [category] tool for [specific use case]”—often still drive clicks because users need details and comparisons that a short AI answer can’t fully cover.
That’s the gap: the awareness engine is under pressure, while high-intent demand still exists but may be smaller and more competitive.
You can’t turn off AI Overviews. You can’t optimize a magic “AIO meta tag” to fix your CTR. You probably can’t get granular reporting from Google on exactly how many clicks you’re losing.
But you’re far from helpless. Here’s a practical way to respond.
Don’t operate on gut feeling alone.
You’ll likely see a pattern:
That tells you which parts of your SEO strategy are structurally shrinking.
Instead of chasing every broad information term, shift more weight toward:
Informational content still matters—it builds trust and supports users—but its job is changing from “traffic workhorse” to “supporting and reinforcing” your core acquisition levers.
AI Overviews hurt most when Google is your main gatekeeper.
Mitigate that by investing in:
The more of your audience you can reach directly, the less disruptive each search change becomes.
If you’re cited in AI answers:
You don’t have to pretend impressions are as good as clicks. But you can acknowledge that visibility still softens the ground for other channels.
This is the uncomfortable but necessary step:
The goal isn’t to abandon SEO. It’s to make sure your business can survive and grow even if AI Overviews keep expanding.
Google won’t send you an email before it rewrites the rules again.
But you can read the signals: collapsing CTR on informational queries, impressions without clicks, and more users getting their answers without ever touching your site.
Responding to that reality doesn’t require panic. It requires clarity:
The businesses that navigate this shift won’t be the ones yelling loudest about lost traffic. They’ll be the ones quietly rebuilding their acquisition engines around what they can still own.