(Header image credit: https://blog.google/products/search/generative-ai-google-search-may-2024/)
EDIT (24-07-2025):
A while after writing this post, a similar article was shared on Hackernews, which had some comments that offered an interesting perspective to this. While companies relying on organic traffic are suffering due to this change, for the consumer, the AI summary is a breath of fresh air. As of late, many sites have become SEO farms, AI slop, and ad collections. Have you ever searched for a movie release date, only to visit a site full of ads and popups, and many paragraphs of text, only to find out after minutes of searching that there is no announced date yet? This site by Guangyi Li displays the average browsing experience pretty well.
So yeah, while the AI summaries are pretty bad for organic-traffic-reliant companies, many of them had it coming as well…
On to the original post:
A fair disclaimer before I dive into this; I am by no means an SEO expert. The furthest I've gone in the past was to add Open Graph tags to my website and inspect the Google Search Console occasionally. However, SEO is something that interests me and I want to write something about it.
How sites earn money through SEO
To start, let me paint you a picture:
The company I work at has several websites that offer the user information about certain topics, for example, solar panels.
Our happy flow would be:
User searches through Google for something in the lines of "What are the best solar panels in 2025?".
Our website offers articles about this, which shows up in the search results.
The user clicks the link to the article and reads it.
The article refers to our solar panel service, in which you can request quotes.
The user requests a quote, which we then send to independent providers who pay us for it.
With this flow, you can imagine that we're pretty dependent on our articles showing up high in the search results. The higher up the results your site is, the more clicks you'll receive, the more money you'll earn.
But this all changed when the Fire Nation attacked Google introduced AI Overview.
The introduction of Gemini in Google's search results
A while ago, Google released Generative AI in their search results. You may have come across it already, When you search something using Google. Often times the first result will be something generated by Gemini.
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Gemini gives you essential information first, and when you click "show more", you're provided with detailed descriptions, instructions, video's and so on. For most users, this is a handy feature that'll shorten the amount of time spend search for answers.
However, for companies dependent on organic search results, this is catastrophic.
As you can see in the screenshot, over half of the usual space available for search results is taken up by the AI Overview. Even more if you click on "show more.". Along with that, after the AI Overview you often get sponsored results first, usually about 3 or 4 sites. And only then, do the regular search results show up. Let me show you how far you'd have to scroll to get to an actual true result from a specialised website (With the AI Overview expanded):
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That's insane, right?
Now imagine how big of a blow this is to companies that rely on organic search. This feature already caused around 20 people to be fired where I work, and I can imagine more is coming if a workaround isn't found soon.
How do we bounce back from this?
There's probably no straight answer for this(yet).
One thing I've read, is that SEO specialists will have to focus on what the user intent is, instead of using keywords to show up higher in the search results. This way, your site may show up in the AI Overview as a reference.
This statement is supported by this article where it's mentioned that the amount of clicks increase when your content shows up in the AI Overview as it offers a form of social proof to the user.
Along with that, I can imagine that generating thousands of articles for increase website traffic isn't a viable strategy anymore, since the AI Overview will simply gather all that information and summarise it for the user right away.
Final thoughts
This is certainly an interesting subject to think about, and SEO specialists must be very busy right now trying to solve this problem.
Again, I'm no expert in SEO myself but I will continue to keep track of this to see how it plays out and what solutions people come up with.