Impact of AI Overviews: What You Need to Know

In this article, we explore ten ways to responsibly navigate the impact of AI Overviews on your content strategy and SEO efforts.

The impact of AI Overviews is being felt most by content publishers and website owners. AI Overviews are produced by Google Gemini, Google’s large language model (LLM), in response to search queries. These results can give users access to content without ever needing to click through to a website. As a result, many content publishers have experienced traffic declines and reduced clickthrough rates.

AI Overviews can reduce clickthrough rates on informational queries by significant amounts. They are also showing up in an increasing number of search queries, according to Advanced Web Rankings.

If you rely on advertising or SEO to meet your marketing goals, AI Overviews are frustrating. However, understanding the issue can help you develop techniques and strategies to better tailor your content for the impact of AI overviews.

AI Overviews help people get to the gist of a complicated topic or question more quickly, and provide a jumping-off point to explore links to learn more. — Google, AI Features and Your Website

Who is at Risk?

Google positions AI Overviews as a link exploration tool. In practice, they often eliminate the need to explore links at all by fully satisfying someone’s query.

This means content publishers who focus on queries that can be easily answered are the most impacted by AI Overviews. That said, any publisher producing informational content is at risk as AI Overviews become more robust and begin incorporating additional media types, such as video.

This is the AI overview for the query “digital marketing.”

AI Overview Strategies

Advertising, content marketing, and SEO can represent a significant portion of an organization’s marketing spend. Marketing teams invest time, money, and resources on these efforts and understandably want their investments to pay off. Unfortunately, as a result of AI Overviews, many marketing professionals scramble to recoup losses and improve their marketing metrics.

However, referral traffic makes up one small component of a much larger marketing ecosystem. Successful marketing leverages multiple communication channels. Incorporating AI Overview strategies into your marketing isn’t complicated. Like all effective marketing, it requires commitment.

This guide breaks down strategies in three key areas:

Content strategies to keep up with the always-changing world of online communications,

Technical strategies to maintain SEO performance while also embracing AI Overviews and the potential challenges that come with them,

Complementary strategies that can serve as natural partners to your search and content marketing efforts.

So, what’s a responsible digital marketer to do? Are sustainable SEO, sustainable marketing, and artificial intelligence mutually exclusive?

10 Ways to Navigate the Impact of AI Overviews on Content Strategies

Big Tech companies are barreling toward an AI-enabled future, potentially with disregard for environmental and ethical challenges that come with that. Alongside downgrading billions of previously ranking pages, AI Overviews often serve users the necessary content without the need to visit a website directly, diminishing click-through rates. 

Here are ten technical, content, and supplemental marketing strategies to consider when addressing AI Overviews.

Content Strategies

1. Remember: Value is Everything

If you have spent any time in digital marketing, you have likely heard the phrase “content is king.” It originates from a 1999 essay by Bill Gates, in which he argued that content would become the internet’s primary economic driver. For much of the past two decades, that proved true.

While it might still be partially true today, AI Overviews are chipping away at content publishing’s reign. AI can summarize and recombine information to answer queries, and it is getting better over time.

It cannot, in its current state, however, deliver outcomes. For example, AI Overviews can tell you when a concert is and how much tickets cost, but they cannot complete the purchase…yet.

As a result, keywords with navigational, commercial, and transactional intent are less impacted by AI Overviews than purely informational queries.

A brief keyword strategy overview:

Navigational keywords indicate the user knows what they are looking for

Informational keywords are used to learn about a topic

Commercial keywords suggest purchase research

Transactional keywords indicate readiness to buy or subscribe

This does not mean you should abandon informational keywords entirely. They still contribute to authority and ranking signals. However, if your strategy has been overly focused on them, it may be time to diversify.

Some places to start:

Branded keywords are often navigational. Review whether these searches surface your site appropriately. If not, diagnose and remediate.

Product or service pages should be audited and optimized where applicable.

2. Nail Your Offering

We just discussed how in an AI-driven environment, value is king. The goal of AI is to give visitors the most valuable information possible. If they haven’t already, businesses should revisit how they discuss their products and services.

Focus on articulating:

Your product or services features and benefits.

Who, specifically, they are for.

What’s included in a product or service offering. What isn’t?

Why choose your product or service over a competitor’s?

Finally, answer the frequently asked questions customers have.

Fleshing out these aspects of your marketing can help AI tools categorize you as being the best and most valuable answer to your prospect’s question.

3. Revisit Your Website Content Strategy

Is your content strategy still fit for purpose? Regardless of industry or technological disruption, it’s always a good idea to audit your content’s performance on a regular basis.

Ask yourself:

Answer questions: Does your content answer customers’ most pressing questions related to your product or service?

Content updates: How often do you update or refresh your content to ensure it doesn’t include outdated references? Similarly, how much of your content is time-sensitive vs. evergreen content?

Awareness: Similarly, how often do you create and share new messaging for repeated exposure?

Crawler accessibility: Is your content gated? If so, can you remove those gates? This will help AI crawlers access it. Learn more about crawl optimization.

Feature/benefit comparisons: Do you offer posts that compare the features and benefits of various products and services to one another?

Content Audit Guide

Related content: Learn to conduct a content audit with our step-by-step Guide.

Read the article

4. Use Truth and Consistency to Build Trust

Sticking with the same theme, the 2025 edition of Edelman’s annual trust barometer highlights that trust in our institutions is at an all-time low. This is only going to get worse as regularly hallucinating AI tools continue to infiltrate communications channels.

However, it’s easy enough to be an exception to that:

Truth & transparency: Prioritize accountability in all your internal and external communications. Use human-in-the-loop oversight on all AI projects. Adopt a Responsible AI Policy that clearly shows how you address issues like copyright infringement, data privacy, mis- and disinformation, and so on.

Experience: Share your journey and personal experience, step by step, for others to learn from. This is especially important when you make mistakes.

Hub & spoke: If you’re a B Corp, nonprofit, or social enterprise, create an impact hub that uses content cluster models to track your social and environmental commitments.

Listen: Even if you don’t agree with them, dissenting voices offer alternate takes. Incorporate these into your publishing strategy.

Greenwashing: Avoid greenhushing, greenrinsing, greenshifting, or any other form of greenwashing in favor of clear, transparent goals. In content marketing, digital greenwashing is an emerging field of knowledge to keep tabs on.

Brand strategy: Finally, a clear and transparent brand strategy should help you make quick work of defining a sustainable content strategy.

5. Develop a Robust Off-Page strategy

Off-page signals have always played a critical role in how search engines assess credibility. Search platforms are fundamentally interested in understanding what people find valuable, and third-party websites help provide that context in ways a brand’s own site cannot.

These signals come from many places but some of the most commonly cited by AI Overview include:

Review platforms: Yelp, Google, etc.

Social networks & community spaces: LinkedIn, Reddit, Instagram, etc.

High-authority reference and media sites: Wikipedia, Forbes, New York Times, etc.

Mightybytes LinkedIn profile.

As AI-driven search tools expand, these off-site signals matter even more. Systems like Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity consistently rely on established, third-party sources when generating answers.

In practice, this means that AI is synthesizing what the broader web says about your organization, not just what you publish to your site.

For organizations, this makes managing your off-site presence an ongoing responsibility. But how do you do this?

Consider steps such as:

Participate in relevant online communities

Seek credible collaborations with like-minded organizations

Be conscious of public sentiment (and respond openly and honestly to feedback or criticism)

All of those and more contribute significantly to establishing trust in your brand and increasing the odds that you will be referenced, if not cited, by AI.

Importantly, this is not a call for manipulation. Ethical behavior, transparency, and good-faith engagement are the only strategies that scale. Attempts to suppress criticism or act adversarially toward negative feedback tend to backfire. Off-page signals ultimately reflect reality: how consistently an organization earns trust on and off your website.

Technical Strategies

6. Use AI Responsibly

In a world of AI-everything, it can be tempting to shoehorn AI tools into every nook and cranny of your marketing process. In fact, many content creation and marketing platforms are doing just that.

Instead, use AI tools for what they’re good at: organizing ideas, taking and synthesizing notes, creating outlines, making suggestions based on information in their datasets, and so on.

Content workflows: Ask yourself how AI tools can help you improve and/or redesign existing content workflows while still providing a high level of quality control and human oversight.

Marketing practices: Understand how you might use AI tools to redefine success in your marketing practices.

Measurement & analysis: AI systems might help you more effectively measure marketing metrics and provide quality analysis (again with human oversight). 

Governance: Finally, create and implement clear digital governance and data governance policies as part of this process to head off potential ethics and sustainability challenges associated with your team’s AI use.

With this new mindset in place, you’re better suited to address AI-related marketing or SEO challenges.

Responsible AI Policy

Related content: Mightybytes created this Responsible AI Policy to improve governance around how we use AI tools, processes, and practices.

Read the policy

7. Deploy Structured Data Across Your Site

Structured data, sometimes called ‘schema’, is not specific to AI, though it can help AI crawlers, searchbots, and other tools better understand your site pages.

Common structured data types include:

How-to and article data

Local business data

Product data

FAQ pages

Recipe pages

And so on…

Also, you should still use a sitemap to help the machines better understand your website and content structure.

However, there are also other ways to help LLMs better understand your site, which brings us to the next point.

8. Consider llms.txt

Llms.txt is a proposed standard to help Large Language Models (LLMs) better understand website content. Some SEO tools, like Yoast, have integrated llms.txt into their products.

Because llms.txt is an emerging standard, no guarantee that using it will result in AI citations. But it doesn’t hurt.

9. Improve Your Information Architecture

As people become increasingly reliant on AI to interpret information for them, it will become more important than ever to make information on your website easy to find and understand.

Many modern AI systems use RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), a process that algorithmically scans websites in real time and retrieves the most relevant information before generating answers.

If the content on your website is well-structured and easy to navigate. This will make it easier for RAG systems to locate, interpret, and use your content accurately.

Consider improving your information architecture by:

Navigation: Streamline navigation and ensure content is well-organized and easy to find by using testing methods like card sorting and tree testing.

Content clusters: Hub and spoke content clusters with cornerstone posts on important topics, as mentioned above.

FAQs: Create answer hubs that aim to answer all potential questions related to a topic and use FAQ structured data, as noted above.

Redirects: Regularly prune and redirect URLs to improve content relevance and reduce 404 errors.

Orphaned content: Insert backlinks to your pages from other pages to cut down on orphaned content.

Sitemap updates: Make sure your sitemap is updated whenever your content is.

10. Stay Focused on Measuring Success

Despite alarming headlines, performance should be evaluated through real metrics. Is traffic down? By how much? Does that impact key conversions? How so? Often, the situation is easier to rectify than it appears.

That does not mean ignoring AI, but it can help manage stakeholder expectations around the real impact of AI search. So you can focus on what matters most.

AI citation measurement is still early. Tools from platforms like Yoast and SEMrush, along with tracking parameters added by OpenAI, offer partial insight. Used together, they can provide direction and identify opportunities for improvement.

SEMrush’ dashboard gives insights on AI visibility.

Staying Grounded

A defining characteristic of the AI era is the rise of tech soothsayers predicting an inevitable and highly disruptive future driven by artificial intelligence. While this rhetoric is effective at creating the impression that conditions are dire, that conclusion is not necessarily warranted.

There is plenty of time to adapt to changes that may be coming. In fact, some of the most dramatic predictions may never materialize at all.

Stay close to your data, identify where your content and systems need improvement, and operationalize those changes deliberately. So far, the digital marketing landscape has intensified and narrowed, but it is not fundamentally different from what came before. You’ve got this.

And if you want help with assessing the impact of AI overviews on your content strategy and coming up with a plan, feel free to reach out. We are here to help.

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