By Grace H

Updated: 05/11/26

AI Overviews, SEO, & Your Content: What’s Happening With Organic Search Right Now?

Content Marketing
SEO

Index:

7 minute read

Grace H

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A person reads on their phone about AI overviews, seo, and the impact of them.

Impressions are rising, but clicks are decreasing. Year over year, your site performance looks like it’s declining. Meanwhile, Google is adding new AI features to Chrome. In fact, every search engine is right now.

Right now, our clients want to know how AI overviews are impacting their marketing. Is SEO dead? Is Google dead? Should you even produce content?

So let’s dive into the most frequently asked questions around AI overviews, SEO, and what that means for your content marketing.

First, Let’s Define AI Language

An example showing an AI mention vs an AI citation

What’s an AI overview?

What’s a mention?

What’s a citation?

What’s GEO or AEO?

FAQs About AI Overviews Impact On SEO & Marketing

1. Are traditional search engines (like Google) still important?

The best way to answer this question is to regularly evaluate your traffic in Google Analytics, or whatever tool you use. Study where your traffic is coming from. Note changes or shifts.

Focus your efforts on the channels you already see users coming from, because that tells you where your audience spends their time.

Recently, I looked at 2024 vs 2025 data for a client. While they’re seeing more traffic from AI referrals, the majority of traffic to their site is still coming from search engines. For example, 11K sessions to blogs came from a traditional search, while 300 came from an AI referral.

That said, are search behaviors changing? Absolutely. My message this year has been that the places and ways we can search are fracturing.

For example, more people are searching Reddit because they want insights from real people. ChatGPT released Atlas. Pinterest is more of a search engine than it is a social platform. Instagram posts now show in search results.

That’s why it’s important to use real data to evaluate which platforms you need to focus on in your SEO strategy. And build your strategy across all channels, not just narrow in on AI search.

Want to build up your AI results? Content influences the RAG process and earns you a citation. But content strategy has changed with GEO. Make sure you’ve got an AI-ready content plan.

2. Can I see where I’m showing up?

There are a few tools right now. Bing is definitely winning the game as they were first to release an AI performance dashboard in their Webmaster Tools. Google is noticeably lagging in giving us this type of information. Specifically for Google, AI mode counts toward any totals you see in your Search Console reporting. There’s nothing in place yet to filter and only see AI mode impressions, clicks, and other data.

Another workaround is to isolate referral traffic from popular AI sites in your GA4 reporting. This will measure visits from citations, but it still can’t offer you insights into brand mentions.

One of the more trustworthy paid options is Semrush’s AI Toolkit. I’ve also had hit-or-miss experiences with SpyFu’s SpyGPT tool. (If your brand has a more local reach, you may have a harder time getting results.)

Want to make sure you’re showing up where your audience is online?

Get Found With SEO

3. How can I tell if AI overviews are affecting my traffic?

Zero-click marketing. If you notice your site content is getting more impressions and fewer clicks, it’s a sign you’ve been impacted. AI overviews are contributing to that.

Here’s an example of what our SEO team has been calling the “alligator mouth.” In their AI overview analysis, they noticed this trend starting across all our clients when features in Google search became more integrated during April 2025.

AI Overview SEO Reporting 1 AI Overviews, SEO, & Your Content: What’s Happening With Organic Search Right Now?

4. Is content even relevant anymore?

Content is always relevant. It’s currency! In the RAG process AI goes through to create an answer, good content is how you earn the citation.

A regular search engine ranks pages primarily on keywords and link authority. (With a few other mysterious ingredients in the mix that we’re not privy to.)

AI ranks based on contextual information, expertise, entity authority, and its understanding of the user. Its goal is to deliver a personalized answer and results can look different between users, even with the same prompt.

There are pieces of SEO optimization that also play a role in AI optimization, but the biggest difference in getting your brand AI visibility right now comes down to a different type of content strategy and off-site credibility earned through PR tactics.

A recent study looked at AI ranking factors based on credible studies. Many of the most important factors tie back to: what topic footprints you’re creating and the quality of your content.

Building out strong content consistently across your site:

Ensures your site is visited more often by AI crawlers since you’re publishing new content.
Helps you increase the topical authority attached to your brand by AI.
Expands the query-answer matches you can rank for, which can also improve your search rank.
Allows you to write using the latest structures that can earn a citation.
Keeps content fresh, which is another ranking factor.

5. How can I rank and appear in AI overviews?

The path forward here is less certain than SEO. AI search is changing rapidly right now, making it hard to answer. But in 2025, Google gave us some hints.

I’ve also been recommending the following tips. In my experience, the clients who were already doing this are the ones we’ve seen already getting early wins from AI search.

Keep content fresh. Update top-performing content around 6-12 months.
Create a lot of context with diverse types of content.
Produce a lot of content to build up that context around who you are.
Answer niche questions and long, long tail keywords.
Boost your authority and recognition with reviews, social signals, mentions by credible third parties, etc.
Show proof of what you do with real-world examples.
Execute SEO best practices, like making sure crawlers can find your content and having structured data that matches it.
Make content easy to crawl. AI companies are starting to conserve resources — a poorly coded site/content flow influences how long AI stays on your site.

Want to make sure you’re making the right pieces for AI search visibility?

Let’s Write Something Good

The Takeaway: Put In the Work to Win

Similar to the early days of SEO, black hat AI tactics are emerging, like prompt injection and more. Bing has a full list of what to avoid. Google is giving the same advice, too.

You might see a lot of appealing advice floating around on LinkedIn or elsewhere online right now. Or spiffy-sounding AEO marketing services. But it’s important to stay well-versed on AI and make sure you’re not sacrificing your brand’s credibility online for a “quick AI win” today that penalizes your brand and stops it from winning in search tomorrow.

Right now, the way to win with AI overviews is to focus on what’s best for the person using it. If you pursue that in your marketing strategy instead of focusing on gaming the system, you’ll stay ahead of the changes just fine and earn wins from AI.