Most business owners we speak to have noticed something has changed about Google, even if they couldn’t tell you exactly what. You search for something and, before the usual list of blue links, there’s now a written summary sitting at the top of the page, pulling together an answer from a handful of sources. That’s an AI Overview, and it’s now showing up for a large chunk of everyday searches, not just the obscure ones.
The reaction from a lot of small business owners has been somewhere between panic and confusion — is this going to kill my traffic? Do I need to rewrite my whole website? In our experience, the honest answer is more measured than either of those. It changes some things, it doesn’t change others, and most of what makes a website work well for AI Overviews is the same thing that’s made websites work well for Google for years.
What an AI Overview actually is
An AI Overview is a summary Google generates using its AI model, drawing on a small number of web pages it considers relevant and trustworthy, then citing them underneath. It sits above the normal organic results for searches where Google thinks a direct, synthesised answer is more useful than a list of links — things like “how does X work”, “what’s the difference between A and B”, or “how much does X typically cost”.
It doesn’t show for every search. Searches with obvious local or transactional intent — “plumber near me”, “book a dog groomer in Cheltenham” — still tend to show the normal mix of map results, ads and organic listings, because that’s what actually helps someone trying to get something done nearby. AI Overviews lean more towards questions where someone genuinely wants an explanation before they act.
The bit that actually matters: you can still be the source
The panic usually comes from a fear that AI Overviews replace the need to click through to a website at all. Sometimes that’s true — if someone just wanted a quick fact, they get it and move on, and that’s a click your site was never going to convert anyway. But for anything with commercial intent, the overview is often the start of the research, not the end of it. Someone reading a summary about “how much does a boiler service cost” still needs to find an actual company to book with, and that’s still decided by the normal search results underneath, plus whichever sources the AI Overview happened to cite.
Being cited is where it gets interesting. Google pulls from pages that answer the question clearly, are well structured, and come from a source it trusts. That’s not a new set of rules invented for AI — it’s the same signals that have mattered for years: clear, genuinely useful content, a site that’s easy to crawl, and a business Google has reason to trust because of its history, reviews and online presence. If anything, AI Overviews have made those fundamentals matter more, not less, because Google is now using them to decide who gets quoted directly on the results page.
What we’re actually seeing in client accounts
We manage a mix of SEO and Google Ads accounts across Gloucestershire, Bristol and further afield, and the pattern we’re seeing is fairly consistent. Organic traffic for broad, informational searches has dipped for some clients — someone Googling “what’s included in a Google Ads audit” is more likely to get their answer from the overview than click through. Traffic for searches with clear local or buying intent has held up much better, because those searches are still less likely to trigger an overview in the first place, and when they do, people still want to click through to check a real business out before contacting them.
This is worth sitting with for a moment, because it points to where effort is best spent. If a chunk of your organic traffic was coming from broad, top-of-funnel questions, some of that click volume was probably never going to convert well anyway. The traffic that actually turns into enquiries — branded searches, local intent, “near me” searches, comparison searches once someone’s shortlisting — is holding up far better.
What’s worth doing differently
There’s no need to tear up a content plan or chase some new trick specifically for AI Overviews. A handful of sensible adjustments make more difference than trying to reverse-engineer exactly how Google’s model picks its sources, which changes often enough that chasing it is a losing game anyway.
Answer the actual question early and clearly. If a page is meant to answer “how much does X cost” or “how does X work”, say so in the first couple of sentences rather than building up to it after three paragraphs of introduction. That’s good practice for a human reader too — it just happens to also be what an AI summary is more likely to lift.
Keep your Google Business Profile and reviews properly maintained. AI Overviews for local and service-based searches draw heavily on the same trust signals as normal local search — profile completeness, categories, reviews and how a business responds to them. We’ve written before about the Google Business Profile mistakes that quietly cost businesses enquiries, and that groundwork matters just as much for AI-generated answers as it does for map results.
Make sure the basics of technical SEO are actually sorted — a site that’s slow, hard to crawl, or missing clear structure is less likely to get pulled into an overview at all, regardless of how good the content is. This is the kind of thing our onsite technical SEO work focuses on, and it’s become slightly more important rather than less.
Don’t abandon Google Ads on the assumption that AI Overviews have made paid search pointless. If anything, for searches where an overview now sits above the organic results, a well-run ad still gets a strong position, and for local, high-intent searches AI Overviews are less likely to appear in the first place. Our Google Ads management clients haven’t seen a meaningful shift in ad performance from this — the change has mostly been on the organic side.
What not to do
We’d steer clear of anything that promises to “optimise for AI Overviews” as a separate discipline from good SEO — most of what’s sold under that label is either a rebrand of existing best practice or genuinely unproven. Nobody outside Google, including Google’s own staff at times, fully knows the exact mechanics of what gets cited and why, and it shifts as the model and the feature itself keep changing. Chasing every reported tweak is a poor use of a small business’s time and budget compared with getting the fundamentals genuinely right.
It’s also worth resisting the urge to judge SEO performance purely on total organic clicks right now. If AI Overviews are absorbing some of your top-of-funnel traffic, overall numbers can dip even while enquiry-generating traffic holds steady or improves. Look at enquiries and conversions from organic search, not just visits, before deciding anything has actually got worse.
A sensible way to check where you stand
If you haven’t looked at your Google Search Console data in a while, it’s worth pulling up the last three months and comparing click-through rates for your informational pages against your local and service pages. A drop concentrated in broad, top-of-funnel content with local and branded traffic holding steady is exactly the pattern we’d expect, and it’s not a sign of a wider problem — it’s a reason to make sure the rest of your local and technical SEO is pulling its weight.
If you’d like a proper look at how your site and Google Business Profile are performing in this new environment, our SEO consultancy work covers exactly this kind of review, or you can get in touch and we’ll talk through what we’re seeing across other accounts.
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