How Google AI Overview impacts 20 industries

Google Search has come a long way in two decades. Instead of simple searches, it offers more advanced search functionality—for example, you can search for local services, find product listings, and do reverse image searches. Still, the ranked list of organic results—where Google lists pages of relevant links, 10 at a time, for every search query—has been the primary way users interact with Google. 

Until recently. 

With the introduction of Google AI Overviews (AIOs), how we search is changing. Instead of immediately displaying the top 10 relevant results for you to explore, AI Overviews attempt to give you an answer right at the top of the page, above other organic search results—no additional clicking necessary. 

Since this feature is still relatively new—it launched to the wider public only six months ago—our team at SE Ranking conducted three investigations to understand the broad-reaching consequences of AI Overviews (I’ll get into the specifics of our research later on). Based on our data, here are all the ways we think this new evolution of search will affect businesses, marketers, and searchers across 20 industries. 

Table of contents: 

What is Google AI Overview?

Google AI Overview (AIO) is when Google uses AI to generate a brief summary or answer to your search query, along with relevant links for you to dig deeper into the topic. This AI-generated overview appears at the top of the search engine results page (SERP), giving users the information they want faster. 

AI Overviews are currently available to users in the US and the UK, as well as anyone who opted into the AIO experience in Search Labs. If you fall into any of these categories, you don’t have to take any extra steps to use it—it’s already baked into Search. 

If you don’t have access to AIO now, Google has said it’ll continue to roll out to more countries in the future. 

How Google AI Overview disrupts traditional search practices—and ways to address these challenges  

The proliferation of AI Overview poses challenges to the three major groups that rely on Google Search: business owners, marketers, and searchers.

Let’s go over the key challenges for each group, as well as suggestions for how to address them. 

Challenges of Google AI Overview for business owners

Here’s a quick overview of the key challenges of Google AI Overview for business owners: 

• Decrease in organic traffic

• Informational queries will most likely be answered by AIOs

• Increased need to promote business through paid ads, increasing overall marketing spend 

If you run a business, AI Overviews won’t kill all traffic to your pages overnight, especially commercial ones. But if your website brings in a lot of traffic based on informational queries—for example, “What’s the safest way to clean my gutters?” or “How do I change my tires?”—you’ll likely see a drop in information-generated traffic because AIO will answer basic search queries faster. 

As overall organic traffic from Google Search might be reduced, the cost of running ads will probably increase because more businesses will opt for promotion through paid ads. Your best bet here is to diversify your ad campaigns with other paid channels like Bing Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and Google Local Services Ads. 

Apart from diversifying your marketing strategies, you’ll also have to focus on improving website authority, building brand reputation, and controlling business information. The last part is especially important because Google AI Overview is still prone to the same issue all other AIs face: hallucinations. It might provide inaccurate or outdated information in searches related to your brand.

Challenges of Google AI Overview for marketers

Here’s a quick overview of the key challenges of Google AI Overview for marketers: 

• Less stability in terms of organic traffic

• Decrease in informational traffic 

• Higher competition for traffic from Google

AI Overview poses a similar challenge to marketers as it does for business owners: informational traffic for basic questions will be lower, as searchers receive answers faster from the AI. It’s not just informational traffic, either. Organic traffic, in general, will be more challenging to draw in due to higher competition and the dynamic nature of the SERP. 

But there are a few adjustments you can make.

AI is great at answering basic questions, but it’s notoriously bad at providing trustworthy data and unique takes. To counter this, focus on creating more high-quality thought leadership content. The odds are that qualified leads will still flock to your expert thoughts and data-backed content—supplementing the AIO or ignoring the AIO altogether. 

You can also optimize your pages so that they appear as source links in the AI Overview. These links will appear below the AI Overview but above other organic results, increasing your site’s chance of getting more clicks than the first regular link in the SERP. The competition will be tougher, but neglecting it altogether will surely hurt your chance at driving new types of organic traffic.

Challenges of Google AI Overview for searchers

Here’s a quick overview of the key challenges of Google AI Overview for marketers: 

• AI-generated answers aren’t always accurate or reliable

• Changes to established search routines 

• Extra steps required to opt out of this functionality

On the one hand, AI Overviews allow you to get answers faster, which, in this time-starved economy, is great. But on the other hand, you risk getting generic responses, at best, and inaccurate and outright odd answers, at worst. (And there have been plenty of odd answers.) 

Despite the benefit of getting the information you need with fewer clicks, AI Overview remains a source of frustration for many users. Maybe it’s because it disrupts established search routines. Or perhaps it’s because users have to take extra steps to opt out of using this feature. But these frustrations will probably fade to the background as searchers get used to the feature, much in the same way we’ve gotten used to other SERP features. 

The impact of Google AI Overview across 20 industries

Using SE Ranking’s new AI Overview tracking feature, which is integrated with Rank Tracker, we compared over 100,000 keywords across 20 industries pre- and post-AIO rollout and analyzed sources featured in AI Overviews. Here’s what that data tells us about the impact of AI Overview across those 20 industries. 

A few caveats worth noting: 

• Our analyses are based on 5,000 keywords selected for each of the 20 industries covered below (results may vary for different search queries). 

• These results reflect trends in how AI Overviews currently operate. But since this feature is still evolving, expect things to change over time.  

The following table also includes a few terms worth clarifying: 

• Average number of pre- and post-click links: This refers to the number of links shown before or after expanding AI Overviews through the Show More button. 

• Intersection between AIO sources and the top 30 of SERP: This refers to the amount of overlap (shown as a percentage) between sources (links) listed in AI Overviews and articles listed in the SERP for any queries related to a given industry. For example, if the intersection is 25% out of 100 niche links discovered, this means that of the 100 links referenced in AI Overviews, 25 of them also appeared in the SERP.

Based on our data, here are some key takeaways: 

• YMYL keywords trigger a lower-than-average percentage of AI Overviews. Businesses that fall under the YMYL (your money or your life) category—for example, finance, healthcare, insurance, and legal—undergo more scrutiny than others because their content can influence people’s lives. In these cases, Google tends to feature articles from high-ranking, authoritative resources, including .edu and .gov domains, or from the top ten of the SERP. 

• Keyword categories that tend to trigger AI Overviews include food and beverage and relationship industries.

• Keyword categories that don’t tend to trigger AI Overviews include automotive, education, and travel industries.

• Commercial search intent impacts AI Overviews. Our data indicates a significant drop in AI Overviews for queries with commercial intent (searches about products or services). For example, pet-related keywords triggered 15.58% of AI Overviews in June, but that dropped to 1.04% in July. 

5 ways to adapt your marketing strategy to optimize for Google AI Overview

Understanding how Google AI Overviews impact your industry is only one part of the equation. The other half is addressing these changes head on. Here are five ways to adapt your marketing strategy. 

1. Monitor AI Overviews 

Monitor and analyze AI overviews for the keywords you target. This way, you can get insights into how AIOs are impacting the search experience for you and your leads. In your analysis, consider the following: 

• Which keywords trigger AIOs?

• Have traffic and conversion figures changed?

• Which websites do the AIOs link to?

• Do the AIOs mention your brand? If so, how’s your brand represented?

2. Optimize for precise keywords

AI Overviews are mostly triggered by long-tail, informational queries: ones that contain more than five words, have low search volume (under 50), and low cost-per-click (CPC). Integrating such keywords into your marketing strategy will increase the chances of your content being featured in AIOs.  

Or you can take the complete opposite route: focus on keywords with commercial intent since they’re less likely to be answered by AI Overviews. Instead, you’re focusing on increasing your ranking for organic search results.  

3. Create content that plays by Google Search’s guidelines 

Google says you don’t have to do anything extra to have your content appear in AI Overviews except to follow Google Search Essentials. For AIOs, specifically, this means creating content that’s perceived as: 

This means you’ll want to regularly update your content, including byline dates, to ensure it’s still accurate and contains structured data. You can also demonstrate your expertise by including an author bio on high-quality pieces. 

Another way to demonstrate expertise to Google Search is by gaining topical authority. One way to do this is by brainstorming a single large topic and covering it through a series of articles. This can signal to Google that your site has expertise on that larger topic. 

4. Manage your brand reputation 

Look for opportunities to build backlinks and mentions from reputable sources—this will indicate to Google that you’re a reputable resource. You can do this by submitting guest posts and working with journalists to get mentions of your brand. 

5. Involve all possible channels

If you find that a keyword you target triggers AI Overviews, and your traffic and conversions have dropped, it’s probably because more people are ending their search journey with the AI Overview.

In this case, squeeze all the brand awareness potential you can get from that SERP. Try to dominate in Google’s:

You’ll also want to use social media, referral traffic channels, and strategic partnerships to help spread brand awareness and drive traffic to your website. 

This is only the beginning 

Google AI Overview is still in its infancy, so there are still a lot of unknowns. Even Google’s executive team is unsure about the future of AIOs—it’ll likely depend on how well this initial rollout performs. In the meantime, keep an eye out for major developments to AI Overviews, and make sure you know how your little corner of the internet works. This is what will help you stay ahead of the game and dominate search in the long run. 

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