There are rumblings about how artificial intelligence — particularly Gen AI and Google’s AI Overviews (AIO) — will impact search engine optimization. Will it ultimately help or hurt? How should you prepare for the shift, if at all? And when should you start?
Just the idea of an entire set of practices that you, your agency or your company has spent years building to drive organic traffic crumbling down is … concerning. The truth is, while it’s still early to tell how things will shake out for AIO and SEO, there is good news.
So, to kick things off on a bright note, I’ll lead with this: It turns out that AI Overviews are actually helping lots of companies achieve their SEO goals.
What’s Been Happening Between AI Overviews and Your SEO Efforts
This first bit of good news should alleviate any concerns you may have had about upending your entire search strategy to accommodate AIO: core SEO principles and practices remain mostly unchanged. So, there’s no need to throw away or switch up anything you’re already doing.
In fact, those all-familiar SEO best practices are as effective as they’ve always been, even with AIO front and center on many SERPs. According to Conductor’s The State of SEO in 2025 report, 91% of respondents from both B2B and B2C companies said that SEO positively impacted their website performance and marketing goals in 2024. And even though Google didn’t introduce AIO until nearly halfway through the year, this is still a fantastic figure that emboldens SEO’s place in our daily work as content marketers. That’s unlikely to change anytime soon.
*Phew* And there’s even more good news.
A majority of respondents to that same survey (63%) also said that AIO positively impacted their organic traffic, visibility or rankings since its mid-2024 rollout.
This may come as a surprise to those who read up on expert predictions ahead of and during AIO’s introduction. While lots of seasoned search engine optimizers said that the impact wouldn’t be too severe or concerning, a good chunk also said the opposite.
Before AIO was AIO, it was called Search Generative Experience (SGE), and many experts didn’t like the outlook for SEO. As much as 30.8% of digital marketers expected SGE to have “detrimental impacts” on their strategies. Fast forward to today, and thankfully, it seems that these folks may have overshot their estimations.
There is something of a caveat to these apparent successes, however — although it may be obvious to most: High SEO maturity helps when it comes to AIO and its impact on SEO. The report highlights that organizations with higher SEO maturity were three times as likely to report a positive impact from AIO on their performance compared to companies with low SEO maturity.
For context, high SEO maturity essentially describes organizations that invest in and prioritize SEO and are consistently improving their performance in Search. Their websites are often well-optimized, they produce high-quality and relevant content, have a strong backlink profile, etc. Low SEO maturity is the opposite, describing organizations that aren’t prioritizing SEO and may not see results as quickly compared to high-maturity organizations.
In this state of unsureness about the long-term impacts of AIO on SEO, I think it’s OK to take comfort in the fact that great SEO is still great SEO and that it will produce tremendous results given the appropriate time, effort and resources. At least for the moment, AIO seems to simply provide a boost, meaning its increasing presence on SERPs is not necessarily a game-changer if you already have a highly mature SEO engine spinning.
Even though it’s difficult to tell what the future holds in terms of strategy, it’s always helpful to know why AIO is working in favor of organizations with mature SEO, so let’s take a look at that.
Why AIO Is Working for Businesses With Mature SEO Strategies
Improved organic traffic is a broad measure of SEO success. It’s great that AIO is improving or optimizing SEO efforts for a lot of organizations with already-mature SEO in place, but why?
AIO Pulls from Top Ranking SERP Results
There is a significant overlap between AI Overview’s generated results and the top organic results on Google. A 2024 study showed that as much as 99.5% of AIO content linked back to top-ranking results that already held a top 10 position for their respective key terms.
This surprised a lot of people because just several months earlier when AIO was still called SGE, folks found the complete opposite to be true. SGE was pulling its content from pages not in the top 10 about 94% of the time. Google’s ever-strengthening focus on trustworthiness, credibility and quality are likely what prompted the change.
AIO’s Ability To Enhance Content Discoverability
Even though AI-generated search results may “harm” key performance indicators like click-through rate, there’s something to say about the technology’s knack for enhancing content discoverability — which, arguably, is just as valuable in a lot of cases.
AIO’s advanced algorithms are designed to surface the most relevant and high-quality content. And knowing that you can earn a link back to your website in AIO by staying the course with your current, mature SEO strategy is reassuring.
This benefit is even more noticeable when it comes to local SEO. AIO enhances local business visibility by understanding nuanced, location-based search queries and delivering hyper-relevant results. It displays local business information directly in search results, including business names, addresses, phone numbers and even customer reviews. This prominent placement in the Local Pack can significantly increase visibility for local businesses, which is why keeping your Google Business Profile updated has arguably never been more important.
Final Thoughts
AIO is here to stay, and its end-game impact on SEO and content marketing is impossible to determine. But let’s recap the good news: If you were worried about having to overhaul your whole SEO strategy, you can rest assured that that’s not the case right now. With AIO pulling a vast majority of its insights from top-ranking pages in organic search, just keep doing what you’re doing with an eye toward creating highly relevant content for your informational keywords.
Striving for a Page 1 spot on SERPs seems to be the best way to get your content in on the AIO action — and you’re probably already doing that. If things change, you know where to find the latest in AI and its intersection with content marketing.
