AI Overviews and your SEO strategy: what the figures really tell you (and what you need to do now)

Since May 2025, Google AI Overviews have also been appearing in Dutch search results. For many website owners and marketers, this feels like a wake-up call: rankings are falling, traffic is dropping, and the traditional ‘number one position’ seems to be losing its value. Are these concerns justified? Partly. But there’s another side to the story. In this article, we explain exactly what AI Overviews are, what the most up-to-date data tells us about their impact on organic traffic, and, most importantly, how you can adjust your SEO strategy in practical terms.

What exactly are Google AI Overviews?

Google AI Overviews (AIO for short) are AI-generated summaries that Google places at the top of search results, even before the organic links. They are powered by Google’s Gemini model and synthesise information from multiple sources into a single coherent answer. Source citations appear at the bottom of the block, but, as we shall see, these are more decorative than functional.

The concept isn’t new: featured snippets were already doing something similar, but AI Overviews are more dynamic, longer and based on multiple sources at once. In the words of Frankwatching: instead of just blue links at the top of the page, users now see an automatically generated summary that combines information from various websites.

The roll-out in the Netherlands: what do we know?

The first AI Overviews appeared in Dutch search results in May 2025. By around 21 May, the feature was widely visible to Dutch users, as part of Google’s international roll-out to more than 200 countries and in over 40 languages. Following the official roll-out, SE Ranking analysed 50,000 randomly selected Dutch search terms and found that AI Overviews appear five times more frequently than before the roll-out: in 26.56 per cent of cases. By way of comparison: Emerce’s annual review for 2025 estimates that between 25 and 35 per cent of all Dutch search terms now trigger an AI Overview.

Note: the percentage varies significantly by sector and fluctuates from month to month. In sectors such as health & pharmaceuticals and business news, AIOs are much more common; in property and motoring, however, they are far less so. Furthermore, AIOs appear almost exclusively in response to informative search queries, not in transactional queries such as ‘hire an SEO agency’ or ‘have a WordPress website built’.

The hard figures: how does an AI Overview affect your organic traffic?

Let’s be honest: the impact is significant. Here are the most reliable figures from recent large-scale research:

• A 61 per cent drop in organic CTR when an AI Overview appears, from 1.76 per cent to 0.61 per cent (Seer Interactive via Semrush, 2025).
• The top organic result receives 34.5 per cent fewer clicks when there is an AIO on the SERP (SE Ranking, 2025).
• Only 1 per cent of users click on the source links within an AI Overview (Semrush, 2025).
• 88.1% of the search queries that trigger an AIO have an informational intent – precisely the kind of content on which many B2B websites traditionally rely (Onely/Semrush, 2025).
• With AI Mode (Google’s next step after AIO), as many as 93 per cent of sessions end without a click through to an external website (Semrush, September 2025).

Put simply: an informative article that used to attract ten visitors a day may now only generate four visitors from the same ranking position. This isn’t some statistical abstraction; everyone can see the difference for themselves in Google Search Console.

Nuance: it isn’t equally bad for everyone

Semrush analysed more than 10 million search terms throughout 2025. The conclusion is more nuanced than the headlines suggest. For searches without an AI Overview, the CTR actually increased year-on-year. Transactional and navigational intent searches have so far been largely unaffected. And, interestingly, AIOs appear more frequently with keywords that have a lower search volume; popular head terms (100,000+ searches per month) do not trigger an AIO in most cases.

The most vulnerable content? Broad, informative pages: definitions, how-to articles and FAQs. These form the very backbone of many content marketing strategies. Those who have relied heavily on them without adding their own expertise or data will feel the impact most keenly.

The flip side: AI-driven traffic converts better

There is some good news, which is often overlooked in most analyses. Visitors who do click through from AI-generated responses are significantly more valuable than average organic traffic:

• Visitors referred by AI convert up to 23 times more effectively than regular organic searchers (Ahrefs internal data, 2025).
• AI referral traffic has bounce rates that are 27 per cent lower and longer session durations.
• B2B SaaS companies report conversion rates that are 6 to 27 times higher from AI traffic compared with traditional search traffic.
• Companies that appear as cited sources in AI Overviews see an improvement in brand perception and an increase in branded searches.

The logic is simple: anyone who lands on your site via an AI-generated response already has more context and is further along in the research process. Less traffic, but the right people. That changes how you need to view your KPIs.

What Google itself says about optimising for AI Overviews

In June 2026, Google published its first official guidelines for GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation). The key conclusion, which we read with interest, is that optimising for generative AI search is simply optimising for the search experience, and therefore still falls under SEO. Generative AI results such as AI Overviews and AI Mode run on the same search index, ranking systems and quality assessments as regular search results.

This is a significant indication. All sorts of ‘AI SEO hacks’ have been circulating in recent months – separate JSON or Markdown versions of pages for LLMs, aggressive schema stacking, and so on. Google’s own John Mueller has previously stated that clean HTML works perfectly well and that you do not need bot-only page versions. And research confirms that schema markup does not provide a measurable boost in AI citations.

How do you adapt your SEO strategy? 6 practical steps

1. Focus on providing answers rather than on rankings

AI Overviews have a strong preference for content that answers a question directly and clearly, ideally within the first one or two paragraphs of a section. Use question-driven headings (H2/H3), logical lists and clear definitions. Pages that use between 120 and 180 words between headings receive significantly more AI citations than pages with very short or very long blocks of text. Q&A formats and FAQ sections consistently perform better in AI-generated answers.

2. Invest in genuine expertise and your own data

Of the content cited in AI Overviews, 85 per cent has been published in the last two years, with 44 per cent dating exclusively from 2025. This shows that timeliness matters. But there’s more: branded web mentions have the strongest correlation (0.664) with AI Overview appearances, much stronger than backlinks (0.218). Investments in brand awareness, PR and thought leadership therefore have a direct impact on your chances of being cited.

Write content that can’t be found anywhere else: your own research, customer experiences, case studies and opinions. That sort of unique content is difficult for generic AI output to replicate and gives Google a reason to choose you as a source.

3. Strengthen your E-E-A-T profile

Google selects sources for AI Overviews based on reliability. Specific indicators that help include: clear author information (name, role, expertise), a consistent publication and update schedule, citations within your content, and reviews or external mentions. Google’s AI Overviews use E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) as a key criterion for source selection.

4. Adjust your KPIs

Organic traffic is no longer the sole measure of success. Add to this: AI citation presence (how often are you cited in AIOs?), brand searches, conversion rate per channel and engagement metrics. Use Google Search Console to monitor drops in CTR per page and identify which content is most vulnerable to AIO cannibalisation.

5. Measure AI traffic in GA4

Google sends a query string when someone clicks through from an AI Overview. By capturing this parameter in GA4 as a new dimension, you can see exactly how much traffic comes from AI Overviews versus regular organic traffic. This gives you insight into the actual share of AI traffic, which content Google considers most valuable, and how the growth of this ‘enriched traffic’ develops over time. Platforms such as ChatGPT can be tracked via UTM parameters (utm_source=chatgpt), available via GTM and GA4.

6. Diversify your traffic sources

AI Overviews show just how vulnerable you are if you rely entirely on organic Google traffic. Think of email marketing, social media, direct traffic via brand campaigns and paid channels. Anyone who previously relied entirely on Facebook traffic and saw it collapse will recognise this pattern. Diversification is no longer a luxury; it is risk management.

GEO: a complement to, not a replacement for, SEO

You’re hearing the term Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) more and more often: optimising content so that AI systems such as Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity cite your content. Our take: GEO does not replace SEO; it is an extension of it. A strong SEO foundation makes your GEO strategy more effective, as Google AI Overviews still rely on the Google index.

Interesting fact: 40 per cent of AI Overview citations come from pages that rank outside the top 10. This means that a lower ranking does not necessarily rule out appearing in an AI Overview, provided your content is answer-oriented, well-structured and authoritative enough. At the same time, 76.1% of the cited URLs do appear in the top 10. So ranking highly certainly still helps.

For platforms such as ChatGPT and Perplexity It should be noted, however, that different selection mechanisms apply than those used for Google AI Overviews. Perplexity places greater emphasis on recent content and citation density; ChatGPT on authority and comprehensiveness. A cross-platform GEO approach is therefore more complex than purely Google optimisation.

Which content is the most vulnerable, and which is not?

• High risk: definitions, explanatory articles (‘what is’), ‘how-to’ content lacking a unique perspective, superficial glossaries.
• Medium risk: comparison articles, industry news without original analysis, generic FAQ pages.
• Low risk: transactional pages (product pages, services, pricing), local landing pages, branded content, in-depth case studies using our own data.
• Opportunities: content that includes original research, expert interviews, specific experiences or unique perspectives that AI cannot synthesise.

What will happen if publishers start blocking Google

In July 2026, it became clear that this debate was not just about click-through rates. The Wall Street Journal reported that a number of major publishers were considering blocking Googlebot entirely. USA Today, Reuters, Politico, The Economist, People and Reddit are among them. Their reasoning is simple: giving away content in exchange for visitors only works as long as those visitors actually turn up, and they are doing so less and less.

The figures behind this are telling. According to Semrush data, organic Google traffic to USA Today almost halved between June 2025 and June 2026. Politico saw a drop of around 23 per cent, CNN around 25 per cent and Business Insider more than 85 per cent.

What this means for your website

Two things. If some of the leading publishers withdraw, the mix of sources in search results and AI responses will change. This could create opportunities for sites that have so far been ranked below them. Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched, but don’t assume the rankings are set in stone any longer.

More importantly, blocking is not an option for most businesses. A publisher has an archive of tens of thousands of articles and an advertising model. You have a website that needs to generate enquiries. Leaving Google would mean becoming invisible. The way forward is to be visible in more places at once. How to go about this, and how to first determine whether your decline has the same cause, is explained in our article on declining organic traffic.

Be aware of one pitfall, though. Blocking AI crawlers to protect your content may now also affect your Google indexing, as Googlebot falls into several categories at once. You can read about what you need to check for this in Block AI crawlers without losing your rankings.

What we do ourselves and what we recommend

We actively monitor which of our clients’ pages are AIO triggers using tools such as Semrush and Google Search Console, and link this to GA4 data to quantify the actual impact on CTR and conversions. This is followed by a pragmatic prioritisation: which informative pages deserve an upgrade to genuine thought leadership content, and which ‘thin content’ pages would be better merged or removed?

In doing so, we take a realistic approach to managing expectations: anyone who overhauls their entire content architecture purely for GEO is missing the point. The foundations – technical SEO, a strong internal link structure, and relevant, well-structured content – remain unchanged. What is changing is the bar for quality and the way in which you measure success. And that bar has been raised.

Would you like to read more about the wider context? Take a look at the Semrush AI Overviews research based on more than 10 million search terms, one of the most comprehensive data sources currently available.