Did you know Google AI Overviews Are Secretly Killing Top Pages While Boosting Hidden Ones

 

According to a study by Terakeet, web pages that are included in Google’s AI Overviews (AIO) gain more traffic, but webpages that do not appear on AI Overviews experience no clicks. The transactional and top-ranked queries get 3.2 times more clicks when they are included in Google’s AI Overviews while informational queries which are lower ranked get 2 times more clicks. Similarly, lower-ranked transactional queries and top-ranked transactional queries get 3.6 times and 3.2 times more clicks respectively as compared to webpages which get excluded by AI Overviews.
The study also found that webpages benefited from Google AI Overviews regardless of the intent. For informational queries, AIO reduces traffic for the top 1-2 positions but increases traffic for lower-ranked 3-10 positions. Webpages for transactional queries get an increase in traffic no matter what their position is on the first page of search results.

This shows that AI Overviews are changing the search behavior by reducing the traffic for top pages so businesses shouldn't only rely on SERP positions now. Adi Srikanth, Senior data scientist at Terakeet, says that AI Overviews is significantly harming some webpages but it is also becoming advantageous to others.

All in all, the presence of AI Overviews completely changes how web traffic behave in search engines and their results pages. This is why education tech company Chegg is suing Google by saying that AI Overviews has negatively impacted the traffic and revenue of their webpage.