News · October 24, 2025
Google’s AI Overviews are the AI-generated summaries that now sit at the very top of a growing share of search results, answering the query before a single blue link gets a look in. For any Bath or UK business that relies on organic search to bring in customers, this is the most significant shift to how Google works in more than a decade. It changes what “ranking well” is worth, where your clicks come from, and what you need to measure to know whether your SEO is working.
This is not a reason to panic. It is a reason to understand what has actually changed, where the pressure is highest, and what still earns attention when a machine-written summary sits above your listing. Here is the honest picture, backed by the data, and what we recommend doing about it.
An AI Overview is a synthesised answer that Google’s Gemini model generates by pulling from several trusted sources, then displays above the traditional organic results. It usually includes a handful of citation links to the pages it drew from. For informational searches, it often resolves the query on the spot, so the searcher never needs to click through to a website at all.
They are no longer an experiment. As of early 2026, AI Overviews appear on roughly 48 to 50 percent of all Google searches, up from around 31 percent a year earlier. In some sectors the coverage is far higher: health, education and research-heavy queries trigger an AI Overview around 80 percent of the time. The feature now reaches an estimated two billion monthly users across more than 200 countries. Whatever your industry, a significant portion of the searches your customers make already return an AI answer before they see your listing.
The headline effect is a drop in click-through rate when an AI Overview is present. Multiple independent studies confirm the direction, even where the exact percentages differ because they measure different keyword sets and conditions.
Pew Research analysed nearly 69,000 US searches and found that when an AI Overview is shown, users click an organic result 8 percent of the time, compared with 15 percent when no Overview appears. Ahrefs studied 300,000 keywords and reported that the top-ranking result loses 58 percent of its click-through rate when an AI Overview sits above it, up from a 34.5 percent drop measured in early 2025. The impact eases further down the page, but it is still steep: position two down around 51 percent, position three down around 46 percent.
A field experiment published in early 2026 went further and isolated cause from correlation. By randomly assigning users to see or hide AI Overviews, researchers found that Overviews reduced outbound organic clicks by 38 percent on the queries that triggered them, with zero-click searches rising from 54 percent to 72 percent. The effect was strongest when the Overview appeared right at the top of the page, which happened 85 percent of the time.
Zoom out and the wider trend is the same story. Around 60 percent of Google searches now end without a click to any external website. For a business whose enquiries depend on people finding you and then visiting your site, that is the number that matters.
It is tempting to file this under “CTR is down a bit, work harder.” That undersells the change. When an AI Overview answers a query, the competition is no longer just about who ranks first, second or third. It is about whether the AI surfaces your brand at all. You are either one of the handful of sources it cites, or you are invisible for that search, regardless of where you technically rank beneath the Overview.
That is a genuine shift in how visibility works. A first-page position still matters, and a top-three position still matters, because AI Overviews draw heavily from pages that already rank well. But neither means what it used to, because the page now lives inside an interface that often satisfies the searcher before they scroll.
Here is the part most doom-laden coverage skips. Being cited inside the AI Overview meaningfully softens the blow. Seer Interactive’s analysis found that brands cited within an Overview earn around 35 percent more organic clicks than those left out. The citation does not restore traffic to pre-Overview levels, but it is the difference between capturing a share of a shrinking click pool and capturing none of it.
There is a quality upside too. Several analyses report that traffic arriving from AI-surfaced results tends to convert better than standard organic traffic, because the searcher has already been given context and arrives closer to a decision. Fewer clicks, but warmer ones.
And there is early evidence the worst of the decline has passed for some segments. After bottoming out in December 2025, click-through rates on AI Overview results climbed noticeably into early 2026, and the searches that do not trigger an Overview have actually become more valuable, with their click-through rates rising as Overviews absorb the quick-answer queries and leave the higher-intent clicks to everyone else.
Not every search triggers an AI Overview, and knowing which ones do not is half the strategy.
AI Overviews are overwhelmingly an informational-query phenomenon. They appear when Google decides the best answer combines information from several sources, which describes the “what is”, “how do I” and “X vs Y” searches. Comparison queries are the highest-risk category of all, with an AI Overview appearing on more than 95 percent of them in one study.
Transactional and navigational searches are a different world. When someone types “book a plumber in Bath”, “buy X near me” or your actual business name, an AI Overview almost never appears. These are high-click, high-intent searches, and they remain a stronghold for well-optimised service and location pages. For a Bath business, that means your local and commercial pages are more valuable than ever, precisely because the AI is not intercepting those clicks, and getting the most from that traffic is exactly where conversion rate optimisation earns its keep.
Local intent is a nuance worth watching. Traditional “near me” searches still lean on maps and the local pack rather than AI Overviews. That said, Google has begun layering Overviews on top of some local results, and one study found that informational “near me” queries returned an AI Overview nearly 77 percent of the time. The pattern seems to be that purely navigational local searches, where someone wants a map pin and a phone number, stay click-rich, while informational local searches that ask a question are increasingly being answered by AI. For a Bath business, the lesson is to keep your Google Business Profile and location pages sharp for the click-rich searches, while making sure your genuinely informational local content is structured well enough to be the source the AI reaches for. This is a space to monitor closely rather than assume is safe forever.
If citation is the new prize, the practical question is how to earn it. The research points to a consistent set of moves, and reassuringly, most of it is good content practice done deliberately rather than any dark art.
Answer the question first. AI systems extract discrete passages, not whole articles. The single highest-return change is to put a direct, self-contained answer in the first one or two sentences of each section, before any preamble or context. Studies of citation patterns found that a majority of AI Overview citations are pulled from the top 30 percent of a page. Front-load your answers.
Write with conviction, and back it up. Cited text is nearly twice as likely to use definitive language rather than hedged, qualifier-heavy phrasing. Pair that with evidence: adding relevant statistics and naming your sources measurably increases the likelihood of being cited, because verifiable claims are exactly what an AI wants to quote with confidence.
Structure for extraction. Clear heading hierarchy, short single-idea paragraphs, bullet lists and comparison tables all make your content easier for the AI to parse. Tables in particular earn outsized attention because structured data extracts far more reliably than prose. Headings that mirror the actual questions people ask help the system map your section to their intent.
Keep it fresh. Freshness is a strong signal for AI surfaces. Content updated within the past year is significantly more likely to be cited, and pages left to go stale quietly drop out. A visible “last updated” date and a quarterly refresh of your most valuable pages is low effort for the return.
Build genuine authority. This is the deeper game. A notable finding from 2026 is that only around 38 percent of pages cited in AI Overviews rank in the top ten for that query, down sharply from 76 percent months earlier. The rest earn their place through topical depth, entity trust and a consistent presence across the wider web. Google’s AI needs to recognise your brand as a distinct, credible authority on your subject before it will quote you. That comes from covering a topic comprehensively rather than in isolated posts, from consistent business information everywhere your brand appears, from visible author credentials, and from being mentioned across the platforms the AI reads, including LinkedIn, which has become one of the most-cited sources for professional queries. This wider discipline of optimising for AI-generated answers has a name, generative engine optimisation, and it increasingly sits alongside AI search optimisation as a distinct strand of work rather than an add-on to traditional SEO.
If you are still judging your SEO purely on keyword rankings and raw traffic, you are measuring an incomplete picture. Two metrics now matter alongside the old ones.
The first is citation frequency: how often your brand is surfaced inside AI Overviews for the searches that matter to you. The second is brand visibility within those answers, even when they do not produce a click, because being referenced still builds recognition and perceived authority that pays off elsewhere.
The practical move is to track a set of the questions your customers actually ask, monitor whether you are being cited for them, and treat that as a core performance metric rather than an afterthought. Rankings tell you where you sit on the page. Citations tell you whether you exist inside the answer.
It also helps to read your existing analytics with fresh eyes. A falling click-through rate on an informational page is not automatically a failing page, particularly if impressions are holding up or growing. In some cases the page is doing more work than ever, feeding the AI answer that thousands of people read, even as fewer of them click. That does not pay the bills on its own, which is why the goal is to pair that visibility with the click-rich, high-intent searches where your business still captures the enquiry directly. Judged in isolation, the click-through drop looks like a loss. Judged as part of a balanced portfolio, it is simply the search landscape redistributing where your value comes from.
AI Overviews have not killed SEO. They have raised the bar and split it in two. The old work of ranking well is now the price of entry rather than the finish line, because ranking is what makes you eligible to be cited in the first place. The new work is being the clearest, most trustworthy, most easily quoted source on your subject, so that when Google assembles an answer, it reaches for you.
For a Bath business, the balanced play is straightforward. Protect and strengthen the searches AI does not touch, meaning your local and commercial pages where high-intent clicks still flow. Compete hard for citations on the informational queries that define your expertise. Publish fewer, deeper, genuinely useful pages built to be extracted rather than thin posts built to pad a blog. And build at least one channel you own outright, so your growth is never wholly at the mercy of Google’s click economy.
This is exactly the shift DripFed was built for: 15 years of traditional SEO foundations, now combined with the AI-search strategy that decides who gets seen next. If you want to know how visible your business currently is inside AI Overviews, and where the opportunities are, that is a conversation worth having.
Smarter Marketing. Real Results.
This article is written for review and reflects data available as of mid-2026. Figures are drawn from published studies by Pew Research, Ahrefs, Seer Interactive and others; the search landscape is moving quickly, so statistics should be refreshed before publication.
Everything we write about, from AI Overviews to advanced SEO, is what we put to work for our clients every day. Let's talk about what it could do for your business.