If you have searched anything on Google recently, you will already have seen it. A large, AI generated summary sitting right at the top of the page, answering your question before you have even scrolled past it. That is an AI Overview, and it has quietly become one of the biggest talking points in SEO over the last year, largely because business owners are understandably nervous about what it means for their own website traffic.
What AI Overviews actually are
According to Google’s own documentation on AI features and your website, AI Overviews and the related AI Mode are designed to help people get to the gist of a complicated topic more quickly, then act as a jumping off point to explore links and learn more. Google is explicit that these features are rooted in its core search ranking and quality systems, rather than some entirely separate mechanism running alongside them. In practical terms, that means the same fundamentals that have always mattered for SEO, crawlable pages, genuinely helpful content, and clear structure, remain the things that give you a chance of being included.
Does it actually reduce your traffic
This is the part that worries most business owners, and it is a fair concern. When Google can answer a simple question directly on the results page, there is naturally less reason for someone to click through to a website at all. Independent reporting has backed this up too, with Forbes covering Stackmatix data showing that a majority of search results pages now include an AI Overview, and that the searches most affected tend to be informational ones, the classic “how to” and “what is” questions many small businesses have traditionally used to build authority and attract visitors.
Interestingly though, Google’s own guidance pushes back slightly on the idea that this is purely bad news. Their documentation states that when people do click through from a results page containing an AI Overview, those clicks tend to be higher quality, meaning visitors are more likely to spend longer on the site once they arrive. The theory is that the overview gives people more context upfront, so by the time they do click, they are already more informed and more genuinely interested, rather than clicking blindly on the first link they see.
What this actually means for your content strategy
Google has also been fairly direct about what site owners do not need to worry about. Their guidance explicitly states there are no additional technical requirements or special optimisations needed to appear in AI Overviews beyond the standard SEO fundamentals already in place. There is no separate AI index, no secret markup, and no need to abandon what already works. What does seem to matter more in this new environment is originality. Google has specifically flagged the importance of unique, non commodity content, the kind that says something genuinely useful rather than repeating what a dozen other websites have already said in slightly different words.
The honest reality is that AI Overviews are changing the shape of search traffic, particularly for purely informational content, but they are not eliminating the value of ranking well. The businesses likely to come through this shift strongest are the ones producing content that genuinely adds something new, rather than simply chasing the same commonly asked questions everyone else is already answering.
Sources referenced:
- Google Search Central, AI Features and Your Website: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features
- Forbes, Google AI Overviews Are Eating Your Website Traffic: https://www.forbes.com/sites/terdawn-deboe/2026/05/18/google-ai-overviews-are-eating-your-website-traffic-fight-back/
