AI Overviews and your SEO strategy: what the figures really mean (and what you should 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 spot’ seems to be losing its value. Are these concerns justified? Partly. But there’s another side to the story. We explain exactly what AI Overviews are, what the latest data tells us about their impact on organic traffic, and, most importantly, how you can now adapt your SEO strategy in practical terms.

What exactly are Google AI Overviews?

Google AI Overviews (AIOs) 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 rarely clicked on.

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 the same time. A crucial detail for any SEO: when an AI Overview fully answers a user’s query, many people never scroll down to the organic results below it. Your page still ranks, but fewer people click through.

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

The first AI Overviews appeared in Dutch search results in May 2025. Since then, their reach has grown significantly. RankPilot’s own measurements from September 2026, based on 60 Dutch search queries, show that Google displays an AI Overview 19 times out of 20 for informational queries, 11 times out of 20 for commercial queries, and never at all for local queries. The latter is a relevant nuance: local SEO strategies are therefore, for the time being, largely unaffected by AI Overviews.

Globally, the picture is even more striking. In March 2026, Ahrefs recorded AI Overviews for 48 per cent of all queries, a 58 per cent increase compared with December 2025. This is no longer a gradual roll-out; it is a structural shift in how Google presents information. The presence of AI Overviews is highest in sectors such as healthcare (88%), B2B technology (82%) and education (83%).

Note: percentages vary significantly by sector and by month. Transactional queries such as ‘hire an SEO agency’ or ‘get a WordPress website built’ almost never trigger an AIO; Google protects its advertising revenue. So anyone who ranks primarily on commercial intent will notice little immediate harm.

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

Let’s be honest: the impact is significant, but more nuanced than many headlines suggest. Here are the most reliable figures:

• A 61% drop in organic CTR when an AI Overview appears, from 1.76% to 0.61% (Seer Interactive, November 2025). Notably, a partial recovery to 2.4% followed in early 2026, so the initial shock was not permanent.
• A 58% lower CTR for position 1 when an AIO appears on the SERP (Ahrefs, December 2025, measured across 300,000 keywords).
• Only 1 per cent of users click on the source references within an AI Overview (Pew Research Centre, July 2025).
• Even searches without an AIO saw a 41 per cent year-on-year decline in organic CTR, a broader indication that search behaviour is changing.
• With AI Mode (Google’s next step after AIO), an even larger proportion of sessions end without a click through to an external website.

To put it simply: an informative article that used to attract ten visitors a day may now only generate four or five visitors from the same ranking position. This isn’t some statistical abstraction; everyone can feel the impact of it in Google Search Console and GA4.

Nuance: it isn’t equally bad for everyone

The most vulnerable content is general informative pages: definitions, how-to articles and FAQs. This is precisely the backbone of many content marketing strategies. Those who have relied heavily on this without adding their own expertise or data will feel the impact most keenly.

Product pages, service pages and local landing pages remain stable for the time being. AI Overviews rarely fully capture commercial intent. If you organic traffic is falling, it is therefore crucial to first determine what type of content is being affected; only then will you know what action makes sense.

The flip side: being quoted pays off

There is some good news, and this is often overlooked in most analyses. Brands that are mentioned in AI Overviews actually see more clicks, not fewer. Seer Interactive found that brands mentioned in AI Overviews receive 35 per cent more organic clicks and 91 per cent more paid clicks than brands not mentioned in the same queries. Here’s how it works: a mention in an AI Overview boosts brand perception and trust, meaning that users who do decide to click through will choose your brand.

Visitors who land on your site via an AI-generated response are also further along in their research process. SEMrush reported that visitors referred by AI convert up to 4.4 times better than regular organic searchers. Lower volume, but the right people. This changes how you need to view your KPIs, and how you Combining SEO and SEA strategies to optimise the overall picture.

What Google itself says about optimising for AI Overviews

In May 2026, Google published its first official guidelines for GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation). The key message is clear: optimising for generative AI search is simply optimising for the search experience, and therefore still falls under SEO. The same ranking systems, indexing methods and quality algorithms that drive traditional Google Search also determine which content appears in AI responses. There is no separate AI index to be included in.

This is a relevant warning in light of the surge in ‘AI SEO hacks’ currently doing the rounds. Google explicitly mentions a number of tactics you can safely ignore: llms.txt files, splitting content into small chunks purely for machines, stacking schema markup specifically for AI citations, and separate page versions for bots. Clean HTML works a treat. Crawlability, page speed and a mobile-friendly site are still the real fundamentals.

Mobile is, incidentally, another area requiring attention: on mobile devices, AI Overviews take up significantly more space than on desktop, causing organic results to be pushed even further down the page. Mobile SEO must now explicitly take this displacement into account.

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-based headings (H2/H3), logical lists and clear definitions. Q&A formats and FAQ sections consistently perform better in AI-generated answers. But don’t overdo it: Google explicitly states that there is no ideal page length for AI search and that you don’t need to rewrite your content in a ‘machine-friendly style’. Write for people, and the AI will follow naturally.

2. Invest in genuine expertise and your own data

97 per cent of citations in AI Overviews come from pages that are already in the top 20 organic results. So the foundation is simply good SEO. But there’s more: branded signals have the strongest correlation with AIO appearances, stronger than backlinks alone. Investments in brand awareness, PR and thought leadership have a direct impact on your chances of being cited.

Write content that can’t be found anywhere else: original research, customer experiences, case studies and clear viewpoints. That sort of unique content is difficult for generic AI output to replicate and gives Google a reason to choose you as a source. Evergreen content with a deeper layer of original insights has a structural advantage here.

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

Google selects sources for AI Overviews based on reliability. Websites with strong E-E-A-T signals are cited three times more often in AI Overviews than sites without them. Specific signals that help include: clear author information (name, role, expertise), a consistent publication and update schedule, source citations within your content, and external mentions or reviews. Also ensure that your basic structure is correct, and that you have a good navigation structure for SEO helps Google understand what you’re an expert in.

4. Adjust your KPIs

Organic traffic is no longer the only valid measure of success. Add the following: 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. In June 2026, Google also added a Generative AI performance report to Search Console, providing a direct way to track how you’re performing in AI-driven results.

5. Measure AI traffic correctly 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 allows you to see which content Google considers most valuable and how ‘enriched traffic’ develops over time. Other AI platforms, such as ChatGPT, can be tracked via UTM parameters (utm_source=chatgpt.com). Our Comprehensive GA4 guide This will help you set it up properly.

6. Diversify your traffic sources

AI Overviews highlight just how vulnerable you are if you rely entirely on organic Google traffic. Email marketing, social media, direct traffic via brand campaigns and paid channels deserve a greater role. Anyone who previously relied entirely on Facebook traffic and saw it collapse will recognise this pattern. Diversification is not a luxury; it is risk management. Google Ads This can serve as a direct complement to those very search queries where you are losing ground organically.

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 choose you as a source. Google itself has stated that, for its products, GEO and AEO are simply part of SEO, not a separate discipline. Strong SEO foundations – technical health, relevant content and authority – also form the basis for AI visibility.

That said, there are platform-specific nuances. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s own AI Mode each use their own crawlers and their own logic. A tactic that works for Google’s AI Mode may not necessarily work for Perplexity. In our article on Generative Engine Optimisation we’ll take a closer look at the specific steps for each platform.

What this means for your strategy: the core

AI Overviews are not a temporary experiment. They are an integral part of how Google presents search results, and they are growing rapidly. The impact on informative content is real and measurable. At the same time, being cited as a source offers a new form of visibility that goes beyond a single click: brand trust, direct search behaviour and higher conversion rates amongst those who do click through.

The SEO strategy that works in this landscape is not fundamentally different from what good SEO has always been: technically sound, with in-depth content, and built on genuine expertise. What is changing is how you measure success and how you structure your content to serve both people and AI directly. Want to know where you stand right now? A SEO scan gives you a clear starting point.