Google launched AI Overviews in Norway in May this year. The share of searches that received such summaries at the top increased rapidly, and today you see this in the vast majority of SERPs (search engine results pages).
At Solid Media, we started early to investigate what types of searches triggered these summaries, and which websites were used as sources in the summary. In this article, you can read about some of our findings.
AI Overviews changes what kind of traffic you get to your website
When someone searches on Google and is presented with an AI-generated answer at the top of the search results, it changes what kind of traffic websites receive from organic search.
Over the past six months, we’ve seen that those who have based their content on answering simple questions in a neutral, fact-based style have lost a fair amount of traffic. That makes sense, since this is exactly the type of answer AI Overviews highlights most clearly in the summary in the SERP. In that case, the user doesn’t need to click through to a website to read more.
It’s unfortunate to lose traffic, but it’s also likely that users weren’t in buying mode with this type of search intent anyway. In most cases, they’re at the very top of the funnel when they perform these simple searches.
– For those of our clients who have lost some traffic on certain pages, we’ve seen that conversions generally remain stable or even increase, adjusted for seasonal variations, explains Zainab Alhussaini, Head of Development in the SEO department at Sold Media.
From keywords to problem-solving
It’s been a long time since SEO work was just about inserting specific keywords into your copy, and AI Overviews and other AI-based search engines have pushed us to evolve how we do SEO to the next level. Many try to sell GEO, AEO or other concepts as add-ons to a standard SEO service, but our experience is that it’s more effective to integrate AI-focused initiatives directly into your core SEO efforts.
To gain visibility in AI Overviews, we need, among other things, well-structured content that makes it easy for both human readers and AI tools to understand what the text is answering, and what the actual answer is. The content can fit into different stages of the buyer’s journey, but you should have a clear objective for which specific problem each page is meant to solve for the visitor.
Visibility in AI Overviews through expertise, experience, and authority
We have long emphasized showcasing expertise and experience to achieve strong visibility in traditional Google search results. These factors now appear to be at least as important for gaining visibility in AI Overview.
“If you want to be selected as a source in AI answers, your expertise has to be visible in the content. That means using your own examples, quotes, clear structure, and language that makes it easy to extract answers. Generic content will be filtered out – it’s depth, clarity, and uniqueness that build trust,”explains Melanie Jørgensen, Head of Content at Solid Media.
