SE Ranking, 08/24: 13.5% of AIOs show up next to ads on desktop. [9]
Semrush, 01/25: 5% of keywords showing AIOs also showed PPC ads. [5]
Seer, 02/25: Paid Search CTRs dropped across the board – with or without an AIO, but they were lower comparatively when Google shows AIOs. [1]
Implications:
If there is SEO traffic to be lost (getting to that shortly), it’s mostly for informational searches, as we can also see the fact that Featured Snippets tend to show up with AIOs. Commercial and transactional keywords don’t show a high rate of AI Overviews, maybe because that’s where ads show up the most, and Google doesn’t want to kill its click-through rates.
On the other hand, Google’s Knowledge Graph does often show up with AIOs. Why? Most likely because the Knowledge Graph is the foundation for Google’s AIOs and doesn’t provide net value in the search results. As a result, you should check whether your brand has a knowledge graph and what entities Google associates it with. It could impact how you should up in AIOs.1
AI Overviews are more likely to show up for longer queries with lower search volume. Makes sense as AIOs answer long questions so much better than classic search results (Google never really figured longtail search out), and longer queries are searched by fewer people because they’re more specific.
How Do AI Overviews Impact Click-Through Rates And SEO Traffic?
We know that AIOs might not show up as often now as they did fresh out of the egg. They occur for informational longtail queries with lower search volume. But when they show up, what’s their impact?
Source
AIOs push organic results down significantly:
Press Gazette, 05/24: On average, organic search results dropped by -980 pixels when AIOs were present. In the shopping vertical, the average was 1,205! Keep in mind that the data was gathered just when AI Overviews first rolled out. Things could and likely do look very different now. [17]
AWR, 07/24: The average AIO is 912 pixels long. [14]
Botify, 08/24: AI Overviews take up 42% of the screen on desktop and 48% on mobile. [3]
Rich Sanger / Authoritas, 09/24: AI Overviews push organic results down by an average of 202 pixels. [7]
The fact that AI Overviews occupy so much screen real estate alone hurts the CTR for organic results.
Organic Click-Through Rates
Source
AIOs shrink CTRs and SEO traffic. Some industries that target high-intent keywords report a smaller impact than others:
Growth Memo, 05/24: A negative impact of -8.9% on click-through rates on average. [15]
Siege Media, 05/24: 3% increase in CTR after AIOs went live. [16]
DotDash Meredith, 08/24: minimal differences in CTR between search results with and without AI Overviews. [12]
Sistrix, 11/24: Prominent citations in AI Overviews lead to more clicks than Featured Snippets, but still much less compared to classic organic results. [19]
Seer, 02/25: AIOs cut organic CTRs in less than half and tend to show up for queries that already got fewer clicks before (zero-click searches). When cited, sites get more traffic, and average CTR grows from 0.74% to 1.02%. [1]
Being cited matters, but how much room is there to win in citations?
Number Of Citations
Source
Since we know being cited in AIOs matters for organic traffic, the next question is how much “real estate” there is, and the answer seems to be 5-8:
AWR, 07/24: AI Overviews contain 7.2 citations on average. [14]
Rich Sanger / Authoritas, 09/24: The average number of citations is 8.2, with small variations across user intent. [7]
Surfer, 10/24: Google cites eight or fewer sources 90% of the time, with five on average. 99% of sources are only cited once. [6]
Implications:
AIOs have a negative impact on CTRs. Intuition validated. “Ranking in AIOs,” a.k.a. being cited, should be the new goal in SEO when they’re shown in the SERPs.
The data validates that informational searches are dwindling in SEO value. So, theoretically, we should see a lot more companies losing organic traffic, though not necessarily revenue from organic traffic. But that doesn’t seem to be the case, at least not to the intensity I expected. A possible reason could be that organic CTRs were already low for queries that show AI Overviews, as the Seer study shows. Maybe the negative impact of AIOs is a continuation of a trend that has already existed for years, which is Google answering more questions in the SERPs.
What’s still unclear is if and when searchers click on organic results below AI Overviews and citations. I assume that user intent is also the deciding factor here, but we need more data.
How Can You Rank In AI Overviews?
When we talk about “ranking in AIOs,” we mean being cited. There is a lot more to be discovered about how Google decides what pages to cite.
Based on patents, it seems that Gemini first creates the answer to a question and then seeks sources that could be a good fit, though I’m not sure why it doesn’t simply ground the answer in the top results.
Based on the data so far, we can agree on the following citation factors:
It’s Not Keyword Match
Source
The number of AIOs citing the exact keyword is extremely low:
Botify, 08/24: Text (Cosine) similarity between the AIO and cited pages shows a strong relationship, meaning the closer your text matches what’s shown in the AIOs, the higher your chances to be cited. [3]
Surfer, 10/24: Only 5.4% of AI Overviews contain the exact search query. [6]
But your position matters as well.
Organic Ranking Position Matters Somewhat
Image Credit: Kevin Indig
Ranking higher is better but not a requirement to get traffic from AIOs:
AWR, 07/24: 33.4% of AIOs cite pages that rank in the top 10 positions. [14]
Botify, 08/24: 75% of cited websites rank in the top 12 positions, but the median rank is 4. [3]
Growth Memo, 09/24: 40% of AIO sources rank in positions 11-20 and only 22% in positions 1-3. [8]
Rich Sanger / Authoritas, 09/24: The top two positions are included in citations 47.8 – 53.8% of the time. [7]
Surfer, 10/24: 52% of cited sources rank in the top 10 results. [6]
seoClarity, 12/24: AIOs cited the top 10 positions 99.5% of the time, and 80% of AIOs cite a page that ranks in the top 3 organic positions. [13]
Semrush, 01/25: The overlap between AIO citations and organic search results is only 20-26%. Over 50% of AI Overviews on desktop and 60% on mobile did not link to the top organic result. [5]
Implications:
Today, AI Overviews cite more pages in the top 10 ranking positions than when they initially launched.
The best thing you can do to target AIOs is to run a Cosine similarity analysis between your text and the AIO. Pick the page that ranks best for the target keyword and check which parts of the AIO it could give the best answer to.
Of course, strong technical fundamentals and good on-page SEO matter, but more to have a high ranking position and increase your chances to be picked as a citation rather than as a hard criterion AIOs evaluate.
How Should You Rethink Content Creation For AI Overviews?
Optimizing for AIO citations and mentions isn’t a 180-degree turn compared to classic organic results, but you want to keep in mind the right format and where you publish the content.
AIO Length
The average AI Overview is around 90-170 characters:
AWR, 07/24: The average AIO is 169 words long. [14]
Botify, 08/24: The average AI Overview is 169 words and 912 pixels long. [3]
Surfer, 10/24: AI Overviews are, on average, 157 words long, with 99% being shorter than 328. Featured Snippets average ~50 words. [6]
Semrush, 01/25: 90 (mobile) to 119 words (desktop). [5]
AIO Format
Most AIOs contain lists:
AWR, 07/24: 40% of AIOs are lists, 24% are paragraphs, and only a few have images. [14]
Surfer, 10/24: 61% of AI Overviews are unordered lists, 21% contain no list, 12% are ordered lists, and 6% are ordered and unordered lists. [6]
Prominently Cited Domains
Source
Youtube sticks out as the domain with the most citations:
Rich Sanger / Authoritas, 09/24: YouTube and Wikipedia are cited most often in AIOs for information intent keywords. [7]
Growth Memo, 09/24: The most cited domains are YouTube, Wikipedia, and Google, which often rank in lower positions. [10]
Implications:
90-170 characters equal roughly 15-40 words on average – not a lot! So optimizing your content for AIOs really seems to be about straightforward answers, no fluff, and a high degree of insight. Similar to optimizing for Featured Snippets, it seems AIO optimization is about tweaking small parts of an article over and over until you get the citation.
The outsized impact of YouTube on AIOs pushes content generation further away from websites. I also found that LinkedIn is cited a lot in my research. So, social and content platforms could be part of modern SEO. At the very least, run tests on YouTube and LinkedIn.
Bottom Line
As a community, we’ve made significant progress in understanding AI Overviews and their impact.
Even though it’s a moving target, we can conclude for now that AIOs occupy informational, long-tail queries with low search volume and negatively impact click-through rates unless you’re part of the citations.
I hope to write a follow-up meta-analysis with new studies in about a year and be able to answer questions like:
How often do AI Overviews change?
How does Google decide which products to list in ecommerce AIOs?
What are sites doing at scale to get more AIO citations over time?
What new AIO formats is Google testing, and how are they different?
How do AIOs vary between countries for the same query?
Stay tuned for next week when I publish my meta-analysis of AI Chatbots like ChatGPT or Perplexity and their impact on Search.
I also plan to publish at least three more original data studies about AI Overviews this year. Subscribe to stay up to date!
1 AI Overviews and your website
Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal