Google’s AI Overviews are revolutionising how people find information, services and products on Google.
But how has this impacted website owners and the traffic they receive to their site? How have Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) practices changed and what can you do to optimise your website for Google AI Overviews & Other LLMs?
What are Google AI Overviews?
Google AI overviews utilise Google Gemini, Google’s step into the world of AI chatbots based on LLM (Large Language Models). An LLM refers to AI models that can generate natural answers using a large amount of linguistic data (which Google has plenty of!).
The introduction of AI Overviews has cost many websites traffic. When Ahrefs re-ran its study of 300,000 keywords in February 2026, it found the top-ranking page’s click-through rate fell by around 58% when an AI Overview appeared. Being featured makes a real difference, though, as Seer Interactive’s 2026 data showed a CTR of roughly 2.1% for brands cited within an AI Overview, compared with 0.9% for those that weren’t. So how can website owners limit these drops and earn a place in the overview itself?
What is Google AI Mode?
AI Mode is a separate tab in Google Search that gives a fully conversational, AI-generated answer with links to supporting websites, and lets users ask follow-up questions. It launched in the UK in July 2025, appearing as a tab on the results page and in the Google app.
Where AI Overviews appear above the normal results for some queries, AI Mode replaces the traditional results page altogether for those who use it. Google designed it for queries that need more exploration, reasoning or comparison, and early reports suggested users ask questions two or three times longer than typical searches.
For site owners, this reinforces much of the advice below. Longer, more specific questions create more opportunities for pages that answer niche queries well, and because a single AI Mode answer may draw on several pages covering different parts of a question, a page that clearly answers one specific sub-question may well be cited even if it doesn’t rank first for the broader term.
Does the Introduction of Google AI Overviews Mean SEO is Dead?
The process of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) involves the improvement of a website to increase its visibility on search engines such as Google and Bing. For years this has been based on improving a number of factors related to Google’s algorithm such as:
- Technical improvements such as improving site speed
- Adding target keywords to the site
- Creating useful content around your product/service
- Building domain authority through backlinks
But, have the changes to Google and Bing using the implementation of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as Gemini and Chat GPT changed the fundamentals of how a site is optimised?
What better way to understand whether the introduction of Google AI Overviews means for SEO than by querying Google Gemini:
Rather than guessing, it’s worth starting with Google’s own guidance on AI features and your website, which says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode beyond standard SEO best practice. Your site still needs to be technically sound, show the right keywords on the right pages, feature quality content and have a solid backlink profile, which will be a relief for SEOs who’ve been doing their job properly.
What has changed is how answers are assembled. AI Overviews and AI Mode may use a technique Google calls “query fan-out”, running multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources to build a single response. Rather than rewarding one page for one keyword, this seems to favour sites that cover a topic thoroughly, with clear, concise answers to the specific sub-questions a user might have.
The bigger concern for site owners is the rise of zero-click searches. SparkToro’s research found that 68% of US Google searches ended without a click in the first four months of 2026, and while the study doesn’t isolate how much of that is down to AI Overviews, they’re likely a contributing factor. Informational content tends to be hit hardest, since the overview can often answer the question directly on the results page, as in this example for “How can I improve my sleep?”:
As you can see the result contains a good overview withou the need to click through to any of these sites (although a link is supplied to reference each point).
Despite this, Google fundamentally remains a search engine meaning they have to by definition serve up results from the data it uses for the queries.
If they choose to prioritise AI content over user-generated website content or not source the original data properly, it will likely lead to a drop in traffic for some informational terms for publishers.
Although there will likely be several tweaks on how Google displays generative AI responses in the future, we have listed some SEO tips for Google AI Overviews based:
What is GEO? Have SEOs Just Had a Job Change?
Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) refers to the process of optimising content specifically for generative AI platforms, such as AI-powered search engines or assistants that produce direct answers rather than serving traditional search engine result pages (SERPs).
Unlike conventional SEO, which targets algorithms that rank webpages, GEO focuses on how content is structured, phrased, and attributed to ensure it is effectively indexed, interpreted, and surfaced by large language models (LLMs).
This involves techniques such as clear entity linking, maintaining factual consistency, using concise and authoritative language, and ensuring brand or author attribution is embedded in a way that AI systems can identify and reference (more on this below).
As generative engines increasingly shape how users access information, GEO represents an important shift in digital content strategy:
How to Optimise your Content for Google’s AI Overviews?
Ensuring your content is featured in Google AI Overviews is vital however to do this, we come back to creating quality, concise content that answers specific queries around your product or service.
Beyond the fundamentals, these are the areas we’d focus on to improve your chances of being cited:
Create comprehensive, informative content
It’s no use creating pages of content that serve solely to rank for specific terms or keywords, the page in question also needs to comprehensively answer that query for its specific search intent in a structured and thoughtful way.
We would go beyond this and say you should be using common long-tail keyword queries as headings (see how we have done this in this post as an example!) where appropriate – meaning it is more likely to be featured by Gemini as one of their featured snippets.
You may want to actively target these Google Gemini AI overview by building out the FAQ section on your site to include more clear, concise answers to some common queries around your product/service.
Whilst Google Gemini is the biggest change to its search engine in years, it’s clear that creating quality, expert content that answers specific queries still reigns supreme.
Optimise for both users for AI
An important one! Content should mainly be written for humans – remember that content that resonates with humans will rank more effectively (and improve how people perceive your business).
It’s worth ensuring your content is not too dry and remains natural and written to appeal to the reader (and not just to search engines or AI).
Focus on user intent and long-tail keywords
Keywords are a vital part of SEO – and always will be. Identifying the top keywords for your business and adding them to relevant on pages to your site will always be crucial.
AI Overviews and AI Mode draw on Google’s live search index when generating a response, rather than relying only on what the underlying model learned in training. That’s why your pages still need to be indexed and ranking reasonably well to be cited, and why content with clear relevance to a specific query is more likely to be pulled in.
As a simple example for hotel SEO, if your website includes an on-page heading for the long-tail phrase ‘What are some 5-star hotel options near London’s West End?’, your page will be much more likely to be surfaced on generative engines such as Google AI Overviews.
Enhance content with visuals
Images and videos definitely help to break up the text, make content more engaging and give visual aides to the reader. By adding keyword-rich alt tags, these images can also be indexed on Google search possibly bringing in more traffic to your website.
Improve site structure and navigation
Internal linking is the process of cross-linking pages on your website, ideally using popular keywords in the anchor text.
Internal linking both helps to make your website easier to navigate whilst also helping search engines such as Google understand the importance of different pages on your site and thus what terms to rank them for.
It seems that Gemini will use the same process to determine what results to serve in its responses, so make sure you keep linking to the most important pages on your site using target keywords for that page.
Sitemaps and robots.txt are two files that are key for search engines to understand the structure and indexability of your site.
A sitemap is a file that acts as an index of the URLs on your website. A robots.txt file is a file that tells search engines which pages on your website can be crawled and which should be ignored.
As with regular search engine results, bots will be crawling your website to understand which content to index or not and the same process will be used for Gemini’s results.
Ensuring your site is well-structured and crawlable remains a vital aspect of SEO that will continue with the introduction of Gemini.
How to Track Your Visibility in AI Overviews and AI Mode
Measuring AI search performance has been tricky. Google confirmed in June 2025 that AI Mode data counts towards Search Console’s performance report, but it’s grouped with normal web data rather than shown separately, and all links within an AI Overview share a single position, which makes it hard to tell which placements are working.
That’s starting to change for UK sites. In June 2026, Google began testing dedicated generative AI reports in Search Console with a subset of UK website owners, showing how often your pages appear in AI features across Search and Discover, broken down by page, country and device. Click data isn’t included yet, but it’s the first clean view of AI visibility Google has offered. The same rollout introduced a control letting site owners opt out of AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover AI features, although for most businesses opting out would probably cost more visibility than it saves.
Until these reports roll out more widely, a practical workaround is filtering Search Console for longer, question-style queries, which often reflect AI-style searches, alongside regular manual checks of your key queries in AI Overviews, AI Mode and tools like ChatGPT.
Summary: What does Google AI Overviews Mean for the Future of SEO?
AI has changed how search engines present results, and with AI Mode now available in the UK, that shift is well under way rather than on the horizon. Even so, the fundamentals hold, and Google’s own guidance confirms that a technically sound, well-structured site with quality content remains the foundation for appearing in AI features.
What’s changed is the emphasis. Clicks on informational queries are harder to win, but being cited in an AI Overview makes a measurable difference, so it’s worth structuring content around clear, concise answers to the questions your customers actually ask, and keeping an eye on the new AI reporting in Search Console as it becomes available.
However, there are undoubtedly some important changes you can take to ensure your site remains relevant for generative AI searches, which include creating more concise, info-heavy content to be more likely to get featured in AI overviews as well as considering how you can integrate more long-tail queries into your on-site content.
Looking for a Google AI SEO Expert to Help Optmise your Website?
If you want to understand SEO for Google AI Overviews and increase your website traffic, Search Hog can help. Or maybe you have seen your web traffic drop since Google AI overviews were introduced and want to recover some of that traffic?
Search Hog are AI SEO Experts that can help your site rank higher and bring in more traffic to your website using both traditional organic search and LLMs. Contact us today to find out more.
