Since May 2024, Google has been rolling out AI Overviews (formerly known as Search Generative Experiences, or SGE) in the organic search results in the United States and over 100 other countries. How will the increased presence of these new SERP features affect SEO and particularly click-through-rate (CTR) from Google organic search?
What Are Google AI Overviews?
As a searcher yourself, you've likely seen Google AI Overviews -- the newest SERP feature in Google organic search results. Generated by Google Generative AI (Gemini), these results provide AI-generated summaries and feature links to associated resource content.
AI Overviews are (at the time of this article being published) exclusively at the top of the search results page, pushing organic results further down the search results page. In many cases, this often means that the first organic search result is below the scroll line, meaning that searchers will need to scroll to see the first organic search result.
AI Overviews typically appear on mostly "informational" searches rather than "transactional" searches. A December 2024 study published in Search Engine Journal estimated that AI Overviews appear in up to 47% of all Google searches.
Will There Be an Effect on CTR?
We know that, in most cases, the higher your organic search ranking, the more clicks you typically receive from the search page. It's the entire reason marketers focus on search engine optimization. However, we do know for certain that ranking in the first organic position doesn't also mean that your result will receive 100% of the clicks on the search results page, but it very likely will receive the most if not more clicks than those organic results below yours. But now that AI Overviews push organic results further down the page, does this also equate to receiving even less clicks on the first result?
Even before AI Overviews were in place, Google included other SERP features, such as the Knowledge Panel and Google Answers on the search results page. We know from years of data that answer-type search snippets for informational-type searches has indeed reduced organic CTR. In a 2019 study, Perficient found that organic searches that displayed a Knowledge Graph panel had approximately 30% fewer clicks on results than those searches without a Knowledge Graph panel present.
Direct data on AI Overviews is still very limited, but a September 2024 Seer Interactive preliminary study on AI Overviews and found that organic CTR declined approximately 70% when an AI Overview was present.
Does This Mean SEO Is Dead?
AI Overviews isn't necessarily the death knell for SEO, but it does shift strategy and focus. As we addressed, SERP features that show at "position zero" aren't new, but how we adapted SEO strategies changed as position zero became more prevalent. Many marketers posit that position zero improves overall brand recognition, but there don't appear to be any current, concrete studies on how position zero affects brand. Further, the studies on CTR from position zero don't typically have detailed methodology to separate search keyword type or complexity. For example, AI Overviews' content may not be entirely enough information for more complex topics, thus likely leading to higher CTR than less complex topics.
Overall, however, as a marketer, I generally believe that brand exposure in the AI Overviews (as with SERP features) is likely a benefit, and I'll follow that mantra until we have data indicating otherwise.
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