What AI Overviews mean for SEO & website traffic

If you’re worried about what AI Overviews mean for SEO, let me remind you of the panic over featured snippets circa 2017. Remember how that turned out? At first, bloggers and SEOs bristled over these quick-glance summaries at the top of the Google SERPs, fearing they’d steal all our traffic. Eventually, however, we adapted and started optimizing content to get mentioned in them. I believe the same will be true of AI Overviews. I mean, it’s already happening: The internet is now filled with the latest advice on how to get cited in AI Overviews (including this article).

I wrote this guide for SEO and marketing leaders seeking practical frameworks to overcome declining clicks and optimize content for Google AI Overviews. Find out what triggers an AI Overview, how AIOs will change SEO playbooks, and where AI Overview optimization fits inside an existing SEO program. I’ll include lots of research and examples, too.

Source

A 2018 Reddit post about how featured snippets could “kill the regular internet”

A 2023 Facebook post from a blogger praising featured snippets and sharing how to capture them

Table of Contents

What are AI overviews?
What Triggers an AI Overview
How to Get Cited in Google AI Overviews
What AI Overviews Mean for SEO
Measuring and Diagnosing AI Overview Impact
Frequently Asked Questions About AI Overviews and SEO
Beyond AI Overviews: Tracking Your Visibility Across All Answer Engines

What are AI overviews?

AI Overviews are AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of the Google search results page, giving a direct answer to your query, synthesized from multiple websites. There may be a few images, links, and a “show more” button you can click to get more details. You can also click the cited sources to read those webpages.

Here’s an example of an AI Overview that the HubSpot Blog shows up in. Notice that HubSpot is featured four times above the fold: as two in-line citations within the AI Overview’s summary, as a clickable snippet to the right of the summary, and as the first blue link in the traditional search results below. Winning the AIO and first position means a brand can multiply the surface area it occupies in Google’s new SERP design.

AI Mode, on the other hand, is the full AI chatbot experience of Google Search. You can access it by clicking the “AI Mode” tab at the top of Google. Unlike the one-shot nature of AI Overview, AI Mode allows …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog