Todd Heft

I’ve been an SEO practitioner since 2013. I’ve seen every Google algo change and the technical issues that went along with them. I’ve also specialized in optimizing on-page content via copywriting to get to the top of search engine results. But Generative AI search results (aka “AI Overviews”) may throw everything I’ve learned out the window because this radical change shows few, if any, links to websites (as of this date).

Sure, links appear below or aside the AI overview and then continue down the page in the traditional manner. But believing that users will scroll down the page and click those links ignores human nature: because the answer to their query appears at the top of the page, users will be satisfied that it's the best answer and the correct answer, when in reality, it may be 100% wrong, or at least not the most accurate. But they will digest it and move on with zero clicks given.  And we’ve seen the impact already: AI overviews have barely gotten underway and almost across the board, organic search results for content (not products) are dropping at high velocity.

I recognize that AI Overviews are evolving daily (literally). Today’s results for a query may not be the same as next week’s or even tomorrow/s because that’s the nature of the thing. But a statistic published by Search Engine Journal in July, 2024 scared the pants off me:

“Zero-click Searches Dominate: Nearly 60% of searches in both regions end without any clicks, classified as “zero-click searches.”

ZERO CLICKS. More than half of the results with AI Overviews received no clicks. That is frightening.

The speed at which Google is digesting and regurgitating information is mind boggling. Check out these radically different results for “best way to train a dog", only a month apart.

In October, the desktop result appeared at the top of the page with no ads. The links to the right, which on mobile appear below the result, are not exactly 100% relevant to the query.

By late November, the format, results, and position on the page radically changed. Now, the result appeared below two local business ads and two additional ads. Now the linked results on the right are more aligned with the query.

Many in the SEO community are now recommending that you work on getting backlinks and mentions across the web so that your target page or your brand is (hopefully) mentioned in or accompanies an AI Overview.

Link building has always been part of a comprehensive SEO strategy. For the uninitiated, the theory is that search engines analyze how many links and mentions every brand, page, or post has and use this as part of what determines the best answer for a specific query. The “quality” of the incoming links is weighted in the algorithm, so a link from the New York Times carries more weight than a link from this blog post.

And link building worked well, sometimes vaulting pages from obscurity to the Top 10 if the links were strong enough. But we're playing a different game now, and unfortunately, an AI Overview may potentially contain your content without giving you any attribution whatsoever. While getting links and mentions has always been part of a solid SEO strategy, going forward, I’m not sure how effective this will be for generating organic traffic.

Here’s why: Link building and brand mentions take months of work to put in place and then weeks or months until that info is indexed and generated by a search engine. Additionally, this strategy assumes that a user will take the additional step to search for your brand or article. IMO, it’s not very likely unless the content is technical. On top of the human nature thing, you’re also hoping (always a bad strategy) that you’re mentioned in the result. I wouldn’t count on it.

Generative AI is a colossal black box at the moment and is still considered experimental, so things will change on a dime. The bottom line is that users (in most cases) won’t click through to your site, as the info they’re looking for is already in the AI overview. The result may be accurate or not, but unless they’re experts on a subject or a born skeptic, they’ll accept it.

In this excellent analysis from journalist Bret Kinsela's Synthedia newsletter, he points out that generative search results (SGE) are an immensely different value proposition from traditional search:

“The primary output of traditional search is source links, which provide access to answers, but typically not the answers. The answers are the user’s primary objective but are not the primary search engine output. Answers are the secondary result of the traditional search output after the user completes the additional task of parsing through information in the source link.

“By contrast, the primary output of generative AI-enabled search is answers. The source links are the secondary output, while also enabling access to further information through the sources. This suggests that generative AI-enabled search is better aligned with directly fulfilling user intent…”

“There are also other benefits of generative AI-enabled search. The ability to conduct conversational follow-up questions and get exposed to multiple in-context sources for each answer summary offers significant value for some queries. However, the killer app feature is the consistent delivery of robust answers.

“This is the threat to traditional search, which is another way of saying the risk Google faces. Some people have told me that users want links, not answers because they want to go directly to the source. This strikes me as an absurd conclusion. Users want answers and access to source links to facilitate verification. Most of us want our intent completely fulfilled in one step as opposed to two steps, which requires additional work on our part.” [bold emphasis added]

All of what I’ve written above is basically to say that nobody knows anything about what search will look like a year from now or if AI Overviews will still be a thing. But it probably will be appearing in search results in some form.

So take any SEO advice about optimizing your website for Generative AI search results with a grain of salt – it may be spot on or it may be useless. For now, keep optimizing for humans, not machines, as per Google’s suggestion.

And for God’s sake, stop writing terrible marketing content based on the tired old templates you’ve been using for years. Google has finally caught up with this technique and is devaluing these posts and pages at blinding speed.

Get help with your SEO now.

Resources on AI’s impact on SEO for your reading pleasure

• Search Engine Journal: How will generative AI impact website rankings and traffic?
• SEO Clarity: Generative AI’s Impact on SEO: 5 Ways SEO Will Change
• Texas A&M Today: Why Google, Bing And Other Search Engines’ Embrace Of Generative AI Threatens $68 Billion SEO Industry
• Marcus on AI: LLMs don’t do formal reasoning – and that is a HUGE problem