The dip in traffic for brand-specific questions will recover as AI tools cite better sources in their responses
Google’s AI Overviews feature, rolled out in the U.S. in May 2024, has brought significant advancements in summarising billions of search queries to get consumers answers more quickly and easily. While the initial rollout wasn’t flawless, the overall performance has been remarkably positive.
Early hiccups may have received outsized media attention, but looking at the bigger picture of this rollout reveals how exciting and powerful Google AI Overviews is shaping up to be. It’s setting the stage for even greater innovation and is part of a bigger revolution in AI-powered search experiences.
Rollout in the U.K. followed in August 2024 and in many other countries and territories in October 2024. What do we need to know about it? How is this changing the bigger AI and search landscape? And how should brands prepare?
While AI Overviews won’t replace all types of searches, such as local search, its rollout reflects a bigger change in the information-seeking process. From Google’s perspective, it’s clear this feature has been designed to enhance and cement its role in the search process as other AI-powered research tools have gathered popularity. By delivering more precise and conversational interactions, AI Overviews complements Google’s traditional search and narrows down results to deliver more relevant, tailored responses to users’ needs.
The vast majority of AI Overviews’ responses to date have been accurate and added value to users’ search experience. While the small fraction of the total results that were erroneous won’t have been planned, and often were the result of deliberate user manipulation, it did prompt important enhancements to further improve the reliability of the responses.
Zooming out, Google making such a significant change and making this available in the U.S. market shows its confidence in its progress. With the staggering advancements made in the last six months alone, from eliminating hallucinations to delivering knowledge-graph-based accurate responses, AI Overviews are paving the way to even more sophisticated and reliable responses, and marking a broader shift in how we source and interact with information.
In other markets, particularly Europe, there are stricter compliance requirements, like data privacy laws and the AI Act, that impact how AI Overviews are perceived and implemented. Google is working to adapt to these stricter compliance rules and trying to strike the balance between innovation and compliance, ultimately, bringing greater user trust.
AI Overview responses are primarily generated by Google’s own Knowledge Graph, a database of information it has gathered from various web sources. Companies like Google are putting significant thought into responsibly managing their information and how this informs AI-powered response creation. One of the ways it’s trying to ensure greater transparency and accuracy is by working directly with businesses to leverage objective data.
Hallucination issues have significantly diminished as a result of the adoption of a new approach called “grounding.” This involves mapping user prompts to a knowledge graph for objective or branded questions to retrieve facts from the organization. The process instructs the AI not to overthink straightforward questions about menu items, opening hours, or services offered. While challenges will remain with broader, unbranded, or subjective questions, where multiple data sources might offer conflicting viewpoints, this is one area that can be controlled and that companies can get ahead of.
Brand website traffic has already been declining in the last year, which can’t be attributed solely to AI Overviews. For objective questions, AI search responses like Google AI Overviews draw more often from platforms like Wikipedia and Reddit than they do individual brand websites, so it’s unsurprising that traffic has dipped in the last year as tools like ChatGPT have risen in popularity. But for brand-specific questions, both Google and ChatGPT are starting to better cite sources in their responses, which we can assume will encourage some brand traffic.
While some search engine optimisation strategists and marketers have raised concerns about the “zero-click phenomenon,” it’s important to recognise that AI Overviews are not necessarily reducing engagement but are reshaping it. AI Overviews help users to complete their pre-conversion research with fewer steps, answering informational queries directly and allowing users to make faster decisions. This shift does and has led to a fall in impressions for brands but an increase in click-through rates on intentional queries.
The consumer behaviour shift from traditional search to conversational AI needs to be considered more broadly. Classic search typically gets users close to an answer, which complements the current advertising and SEO models, but as humans engage AI in ongoing dialogues, they are more likely to be narrowed down to a smaller group of specific products or services to answer a question.
Customers may be less likely to follow ad links, but probably more likely to convert into a sale if presented with more tailored responses. Brands shouldn’t worry so much about less traffic and clicks, but ultimately see this as an opportunity to have more valuable interactions with customers. Having more impactful direct citations of a brand across a wider range of publishers is the best way to keep pace with this change, given we know AI searches pull from a wider net than the traditional big hitters that boost SEO rankings.
AI Overviews are just the beginning of a new era in search - an era that offers brands unprecedented opportunities to connect with consumers in smarter, more meaningful ways. Those who are willing to embrace the evolving AI-driven search landscape and take control of their data will ensure they don’t just remain visible but become a central part of this evolution.
Establishing a robust knowledge graph not only prevents AI hallucinations but ensures your brand's information is accurate, timely, and consistently engaging. Brands across the globe that adjust their mindset from traditional search today to adapt to conversational search models will be the brands leading the way tomorrow.
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