If you use Google at all, you’ve almost certainly seen some AI Overviews. These AI-generated responses typically show up at the top of search results, aiming to answer queries before users even scroll down to the list of website pages. And since they have a tendency to siphon traffic away from websites, they can also pose an issue for businesses like yours.
Fortunately, there are still ways to maintain your search visibility — both in the traditional sense and via AI citations. But to adapt to changes in the search landscape, you need to be able to plan ahead. And that means you need to look to the future of AI Overviews.
That’s what we’ll be covering on this page. We’ll walk through the following topics:
- The current state of AI Overviews
- Trends shaping the future of AI Overviews
- Future impact of AI Overviews on search visibility
- Preparing your SEO strategy for the AI Overview era
The current state of AI Overviews
Currently, AI Overviews appear in 25.8% of all U.S. Google searches — but that statistic goes up to 39% for long-tail, informational queries. That goes to show how prevalent Google AI Overviews have become in search results.
This matters because AI Overviews can make it a lot harder to earn organic traffic through Google. They impact several different search metrics — visibility, click-through rates, and competitive positioning, to name a few. When these metrics are thrown off, it can alter your lead flow and pipeline visibility, resulting in a higher cost of customer acquisition.
The good news is that AI Overviews aren’t completely ubiquitous yet. The exact likelihood of an AI Overview appearing in a search varies based on query length, type, and industry. So, you can target searches where AI Overviews have less chance of appearing — such as local and transactional queries — to lower your chances of competing with AI in search results.
Trends shaping the future of AI Overviews
Now that we’ve established what Google AI Overviews look like right now, let’s talk about where they’re headed. Of course, we don’t have the gift of prophecy, so there are no guarantees what will happen. But we can still make predictions about what the next few years will look like by examining some current and upcoming trends related to AI Overviews.
Here are some of the major trends that can clue us in to the future of AI Overviews:
- Expansion to more query types: AI Overviews have appeared in more and more searches over time. While they currently don’t show up in shorter or commercial searches as much, that may change in the coming years.
- Paid ad integration: Paid ads have already started to appear in AI Overviews. Much like what happened in Google’s traditional search results, we can likely expect to see more and more ads infiltrate AI Overviews over the years.
- Greater personalization: The release of Gemini 2.0 brought greater personalization compared to the original model. It’s very likely that future versions will give AI Overviews even more personalization, as well as possibly some multimodal capabilities.
- Higher adoption in high-value industries: AI Overviews will likely continue to appear more frequently in high-value searches that rely heavily on expertise and complex information. Affected industries will include healthcare, law, finance, and more.
- Greater focus on AI Mode: AI Overviews were the start of Google’s shift to AI, but a more recent development is AI Mode, which relies entirely on AI responses — no traditional search results. As Google focuses more and more on AI, AI Mode may become more heavily prioritized.
You can likely expect to see these trends start to progress within the next 1–2 years, which will be characterized by increased ad presence and a greater number of industries being impacted. And within the next 3–5 years, there’s a good chance that AI Overviews will become the default for most informational queries.
Future impact of AI Overviews on search visibility
Google AI Overviews have already impacted search visibility for many businesses, and that impact will only continue to grow in the future.
One way this will happen is that AI Overviews will become the new “position zero,” a title formerly held by featured snippets. If your content isn’t cited in the Overview for a search, you won’t truly be ranking at the top. Businesses that are cited will disproportionately capture brand authority and traffic, so AI Overviews will be a highly coveted spot.
It’s also entirely likely that AI Overviews will end up driving way more traffic than traditional search results. The data bears this out — while AI Overviews haven’t surpassed traditional rankings yet, generative AI traffic has grown at a rate 165 times faster than organic traffic. That’s a wild number that shows how quickly traffic generation is shifting toward AI, and it gives us a look at what to expect in the coming years.
Preparing your SEO strategy for the AI Overview era
Given all the trends and predictions we’ve just covered, it’s pretty clear what businesses should do — they should optimize for AI Overviews. The question is, what does that actually look like? How can businesses implement AI Overview optimization on their websites?
Here are some of the most effective ways your company can optimize for AI Overviews in the near future:
- Stay helpful and relevant: Using the right keywords isn’t enough. Your content should be genuinely helpful for users and relevant to the search queries it’s targeting. That increases your likelihood of appearing in AI Overviews.
- Be highly specific: The more general your content is, the more it will blend in with other pages, and the less likely it is to get cited. But when you focus on highly specific topics, you stand out from the crowd and earn more AI citations.
- Boost your E-E-A-T: E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authority, and trust. Demonstrating all of those things in your content is important both for traditional SEO and for AI overview optimization, so be sure to highlight your unique insight as an industry expert in your content.
- Earn backlinks and mentions: Earning backlinks from third-party websites (as well as mentions on social media) is a great way to signal to Google that your content is trusted and reputable, increasing its chances of getting cited in AI Overviews.
- Target local and transactional searches: As previously mentioned, AI Overviews appear less frequently in local and transactional searches. That makes those searches the ideal ones to target to avoid competition with AI Overviews.
- Maintain traditional on-page SEO: Over half of all AI Overview citations come from pages already ranking in the top 10 spots in Google. That means traditional SEO tactics like page speed optimization and mobile-friendliness are still helpful for earning AI citations.
- Monitor your AI visibility: Keep an eye on how visible your content is in AI Overviews so that you can reoptimize as needed. You can check your AI visibility with our AI Overview checker.
Of course, keep in mind that as AI Overviews continue developing, the most effective way to optimize for them could change as well. That means you should keep an eye on the latest AI and marketing trends, particularly when it comes to tactics like OmniSEO™.
Make your content AI Overview-ready with SEO.com
Both the present and future of AI Overviews are filled with change. From ad integration to continued industry expansion, you can expect continued developments in the realm of AI search, and that requires continued development from your marketing as well.
If you want help with your AI Overview optimization — or your OmniSEO strategy more broadly — look no further than SEO.com. We’re the experts in AI search marketing, and with our OmniSEO™ services, you’ll be able to future-proof your website content and keep your traffic and rankings high.
Interested in partnering with us? Just contact us online today!
Future-Proof Your SEO Strategy with OmniSEO™
Goodbye search engine optimization, hello search everywhere optimization.
Future-Proof Your SEO Strategy with OmniSEO™
Goodbye search engine optimization, hello search everywhere optimization.
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