AI Overviews Disrupt Search: New SEO & Content Strategies Emerge

Origin Reddit Post

r/technology

Surprising no one, new research says AI Overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

Posted by u/cos•07/23/2025

Top Comments

u/Zookeeper187

If they train models on my shitposting, god help you all.

u/one_pound_of_flesh

Fun fact, this has been a problem at Google for many years, and predates modern LLMs. It has basically cannibalized its top results to give highlights so users never need to leave the Search

u/beggargirl

How to keep cheese from sliding off your pizza

u/droonick

I love it when the AI summary tells me something absolutely and hilariously wrong about a niche subject, while sounding as it has all the confidence in the world.

u/one_pound_of_flesh

Fun fact, this has been a problem at Google for many years, and predates modern LLMs. It has basically cannibalized its top results to give highlights so users never need to leave the Search

u/forsayken

Sponsored/promoted results within the Gemini answers. Yes this will influence the answer you are given. Just like normal search results. It will all be gamed and manipulated. This is just a

u/zertoman

This answer brought to you by Carl’s JR.

u/Outrageous_Reach_695

[1500 miles, for anyone wondering.](https://www.livescience.com/15307-record-breaking-cougar-trend-wildlife.html) (Article cited in Google AI Overview for [how far can mountain lions travel

u/TheCatDeedEet

It does make you wonder what their end game is. It seems like they actually believe AI could just create all content and they somehow…. Profit… off… that? Or they have no plan at all and are

u/i_am_not_sam

I automatically ignore AI summaries but it's really really fucking annoying that the search results these days are also mostly AI generated slop with the same nugget of questionable informati

u/whichwitch9

Not just that. For example, I was looking for a specific article on a mountain lion that had been hit by a car in CT. I vaguely knew what I was looking for but was short on details. When I t

u/TScottFitzgerald

Yeah, that's usually what I go to Reddit for.

u/UnlurkedToPost

Wasn't there a thing a few months back where the AI pulled a joke comment from reddit that was something super absurd? I don't remember what it was about, but it might have been something li

u/TheCountMC

Google can either kill it with something they own and control, or they can let someone else kill it with something they don't control. AI summarization is the next iteration of finding info

u/Zookeeper187

It’s obvious what their next monetization plan is. It’s already starting with news like: > OpenAI working on payment checkout system within ChatGPT They will take cuts from sales via the

u/snarkasm_0228

Adding “-ai” at the end of every search always works for me!

u/guitcastro

To be replaced by llm-ads.

u/Nulligun

Queue the people saying it doesn’t actually make you search any faster than plain old google search.

u/ethanjim

I think the end goal is hyper focused AI generated personalised ads which cost companies a lot of money.

u/RoboiosMut

But remember. The more search results coming from AI content, the eagerer people for human curated content

u/Hapster23

They noticed people started going to chat gpt to write their questions instead so they had to take the loss and retain people coming to Thier website, eventually they can monetise it

u/TheCountMC

Yup. Google can either lose traffic to a competitor, or retain traffic at a cost to themselves. The latter allows them to figure out a way to keep monetizing.

u/guitcastro

To be replaced by llm-ads.

u/caityqs

It’s worse than that… the new model will be to pay to have the AI endorse products in a subtle way, presented as “truth” to the users. Ads are much more valuable when users don’t realize the

u/potatodrinker

Adwords is the old name, changed about 5-6ish years ago. Might take a while for AI overviews to hit advertiser revenues though. AI overviews for research. They seem to show less often, prioi

u/ThatFireGuy0

Who could have guessed that not requiring a click to get your question answered would mean people click less?

u/Andus35

That is unfortunate. From what I have seen, the AI overview in Google is often trash. I skip right over it and just look at the normal results now.

u/checker280

The endgame is the same as yesterday. Kill off the competition, create a monopoly… then slam the gate shut and raise the prices.

u/rnilf

> Pew found that just 1 percent of AI Overviews produced a click on a source. These sources are most frequently Wikipedia, YouTube, and Reddit, which collectively account for 15 percent of

u/Inquisitive_idiot

ShiteGpt: “c’mon bro it’s two $hit coins, I know you’re good for it - PREPARE FOR RETINAL SCAN - told you the purchase was gonna be easy

u/Sensitive_Peak_8204

I don’t think you’re getting it - there’s a network of publishers who will be hurt. Many businesses will see a decline in ad publishing revenue = increase in shutting down of websites.

u/actuallywaffles

They've had it pull from The Onion articles and suggest people eat rocks before, too.

u/Sensitive_Peak_8204

Yeah it’s a tricky situation. Because they moved away from showing lots of ads on the search page, given how large their network of ad-publishers is. But if pages aren’t being clicked - those

u/DumbButtFace

How many people are really bidding big dollars on the sort of queries that can be solved from reading a 2 paragraph summary? Most of the money is on transactional keywords. I think Google Ad

u/garrus-ismyhomeboy

I can’t even imagine how this gonna mess with the people who view chatgpt as actual person and asks it for life advice on everything.

u/Latakerni21377

I've been googling stuff with 'reddit' added, haven't changed that

u/Hatch-Match952531

I just did this search in Kagi using their standard search and the AI summary. The main search returned articles from ctpublic and the reuters with details on the incident. No ads, right to t

u/flirtmcdudes

Whats stupid is that they would basically monetize AI prompts like they would search engine keywords… it’s like we’re just moving everything into a new box.

u/one_pound_of_flesh

That’s the Uber model. Not the first and not the last.

u/caityqs

u/ThatFireGuy0

Who could have guessed that not requiring a click to get your question answered would mean people click less?

u/actuallywaffles

They've had it pull from The Onion articles and suggest people eat rocks before, too.

u/KnotSoSalty

I get a ridiculous number of Reddit answers on google.

u/UnlurkedToPost

Wasn't there a thing a few months back where the AI pulled a joke comment from reddit that was something super absurd? I don't remember what it was about, but it might have been something li

u/Plyphon

100%. You’ll start reading a reply and halfway through you’ll realise it’s a ad dressed up as a very personalised response. And this space won’t be regulated for years - there will be no “sp

u/MaxHobbies

SEO needs to die a big horrible death. I for one welcome the change. Google was beater in 2001 than it is today.

u/Party-Operation-393

This would be a hard pm decision because it comes at the expensive of a major metric. I think for a search user, it’s a better experience than making me do extra work to get an answer to my q

u/RoboiosMut

But remember. The more search results coming from AI content, the eagerer people for human curated content

u/userax

And yet, if Google doesn't do it, someone else will. Blockbuster had the money and tech, but lost to Netflix because Blockbuster didn't want to kill their own business model. So they watched

u/hillskb

I wish there was a way to turn off AI overview. I scroll past it every time without even reading.

u/StandardMundane4181

Right and it is usually just a summary of the top website search hits. So it’s like literally transparently ripping off the top search result right in front of everyone’s face.

u/Logical_Software_772

So does this mean using AI is bad for SEO?

u/Rare-Fisherman-9696

Yeah, this was always going to happen. If Google starts handing out full answers right at the top with AI Overviews, why would the average user bother clicking through to actual websites? It’

u/daronjay

Be patient , once people are hooked on this, ads and “featured websites” will find their way into the overview results I guarantee it.gif

u/OverclockingUnicorn

Surely it is also bad for Google ads? Less traffic to sites = less ads served Seems counter to their main business model tbh

u/Sensitive_Peak_8204

Yeah it’s a tricky situation. Because they moved away from showing lots of ads on the search page, given how large their network of ad-publishers is. But if pages aren’t being clicked - those

u/Pyrostemplar

And Kodak - they invented digital photography. but it competed with their bread and butter.

u/Outrageous_Reach_695

[1500 miles, for anyone wondering.](https://www.livescience.com/15307-record-breaking-cougar-trend-wildlife.html) (Article cited in Google AI Overview for [how far can mountain lions travel

u/droonick

I love it when the AI summary tells me something absolutely and hilariously wrong about a niche subject, while sounding as it has all the confidence in the world.

u/fullofspiders

It's funny; we're in some ways seeing a temporary de-enshittification of google search. For years, searches have been compromised by SEO, pay-to-play bullshit, and while the AI overviews are

u/userax

>Except it was obvious that you can make profit with Netflix. Maybe they thought it would be smaller than what they lose but still profit. This is easy to say in hindsight but I doubt it

u/itos

They make a lot of profit from the Google Cloud Platform that sells a lot of AI products, not just the Gemini chat.

u/9-11GaveMe5G

From my (outsider) understanding, Google, while technically a single company, is so compartmentalized that they are essentially competing divisions. A good example is why they introduce a thi

u/electricfoxyboy

This would bother me more if the majority of websites weren’t already slop. Top results of nearly every search are rehashed garbage drawn out to fit in more ads and half of them are now AI ge

u/Sensitive_Peak_8204

Yeah but this is generally the American way - lure people in, extract as much resource as possible out of them, then shelve them when you have something else that makes you better off. Is it

u/Vecna_Is_My_Co-Pilot

The issue for Netflix streaming was the cost of supplying the streams in a way to not take overall loss. The issue with LLMs is that nobody knows how to make any revenue.

u/Valuable_Tomato_2854

I am 1000% certain we will start seeing ads in LLM chatbot UIs soon. The more daring ones might even start including them in recommendations from the LLM itself for specific topics.

u/forsayken

For Google there will always be inventory. If they are not getting the cut from publishers, the ads will appear in Gemini results.

u/flirtmcdudes

I’m literally going through this right now. The majority of the main pages for my company haven’t moved down at all in average rank positions in search results, but organic click through rate

u/9-11GaveMe5G

Killing your biggest profit center with your biggest loss center is certainly a choice

u/effyochicken

It just makes those ads less valuable, and the ones that put your link as a sponsored result at the top on a search page even more valuable.

u/Plyphon

100%. You’ll start reading a reply and halfway through you’ll realise it’s a ad dressed up as a very personalised response. And this space won’t be regulated for years - there will be no “sp

u/userax

And yet, if Google doesn't do it, someone else will. Blockbuster had the money and tech, but lost to Netflix because Blockbuster didn't want to kill their own business model. So they watched

u/Sensitive_Peak_8204

I don’t think you’re getting it - there’s a network of publishers who will be hurt. Many businesses will see a decline in ad publishing revenue = increase in shutting down of websites.

u/BlackEagleActual

I mean, just insert ads directly in the AI results, or make some 'shadow insertion' if this is too explict. They could still get the big money.

u/daronjay

Be patient , once people are hooked on this, ads and “featured websites” will find their way into the overview results I guarantee it.gif

u/MaxHobbies

SEO needs to die a big horrible death. I for one welcome the change. Google was beater in 2001 than it is today.

u/Jota769

Oh see, you’re under the mistaken assumption that these C-Suites care about the long term health of their businesses. They just want to show short-term growth and cost-cutting, then they’ll

u/Rare-Fisherman-9696

Yeah, this was always going to happen. If Google starts handing out full answers right at the top with AI Overviews, why would the average user bother clicking through to actual websites? It’

u/BlackEagleActual

I mean, just insert ads directly in the AI results, or make some 'shadow insertion' if this is too explict. They could still get the big money.

u/ACCount82

They took our jobs...

u/311196

And the AI overview is incorrect, so I have to spend more time searching for the correct information.d

u/Hapster23

They noticed people started going to chat gpt to write their questions instead so they had to take the loss and retain people coming to Thier website, eventually they can monetise it

u/habitual_viking

I’ve been trying to figure out if you can have HomePod only play radio stations from your own county. Not matter how I fucking write the search, Google will only come up with AI overview tha

u/Pyrostemplar

Exaclty. So Google either "kills" its main business or watches other killing it.

u/FamilyFeud17

Will anyone bother to wrote good contents when pages get little views. What contents are AI going to be trained on then?

u/TScottFitzgerald

Yeah, that's usually what I go to Reddit for.

u/TheCountMC

Google can either kill it with something they own and control, or they can let someone else kill it with something they don't control. AI summarization is the next iteration of finding info

u/rco8786

LLM adwords coming soon, don't worry

u/Pyrostemplar

Exaclty. So Google either "kills" its main business or watches other killing it.

u/Grosjeaner

They're gonna introduce watch 30s ads to reveal overview soon.

u/2Autistic4DaJoke

Important to note the websites that the source data comes from for your answers aren’t getting the “traffic” benefits of those answers that are generated by the AI overview.

u/flirtmcdudes

Whats stupid is that they would basically monetize AI prompts like they would search engine keywords… it’s like we’re just moving everything into a new box.

u/Sensitive_Peak_8204

Yeah but this is generally the American way - lure people in, extract as much resource as possible out of them, then shelve them when you have something else that makes you better off. Is it

u/AltruisticDealer4717

This actually bother me a lots because Google's profit model is still heavily rely on Ads, and there's little if not zero Ads in Overview compare to the original search result, and overview i

u/Good_Air_7192

Yeah exactly, pay for a biased Gemini result. This is why AI for profit is like the bad things on the internet turned up to 11. People run their Reddit comments through LLMs now because they

u/truthiness-

AI Ads; We can call it, I don’t know, AIDS for short!

u/StandardMundane4181

Right and it is usually just a summary of the top website search hits. So it’s like literally transparently ripping off the top search result right in front of everyone’s face.

u/Pyrostemplar

Exaclty. So Google either "kills" its main business or watches other killing it.

u/marx-was-right-

All the leadership at these tech companies who would have stepped in and stopped this madness are all either too drunk on their own fortunes to care, or were pushed out by people who were. T

u/HoTranBrasky

They have to eat their own lunch before someone else does. The billion dollar question is how do they pivot.

u/-apotheosis-

Yesterday I tried to ask it for information on Ozzy Osbourne biting a dove's head off way before the bat thing happened and the AI overview told me I must be confused because, "Ozzy Osbourne

u/_ECMO_

Except it was obvious that you can make profit with Netflix. Maybe they thought it would be smaller than what they lose but still profit. On the other hand there is no clear path to LLM bein

u/rnilf

> Pew found that just 1 percent of AI Overviews produced a click on a source. These sources are most frequently Wikipedia, YouTube, and Reddit, which collectively account for 15 percent of

u/forsayken

Sponsored/promoted results within the Gemini answers. Yes this will influence the answer you are given. Just like normal search results. It will all be gamed and manipulated. This is just a

u/ethanjim

I think the end goal is hyper focused AI generated personalised ads which cost companies a lot of money.

u/one_pound_of_flesh

That’s the Uber model. Not the first and not the last.

u/checker280

The endgame is the same as yesterday. Kill off the competition, create a monopoly… then slam the gate shut and raise the prices.

u/GongTzu

In the last year they have been preparing to fight this trend. If I search for a part number or an EAN code it’s pretty specific, but from showing precise results, I see a lot of junk, that a

u/Olangotang

Greed. Something must happen to your brain once you get all of this $$$ and power.

u/Andus35

That is unfortunate. From what I have seen, the AI overview in Google is often trash. I skip right over it and just look at the normal results now.

u/garrus-ismyhomeboy

I can’t even imagine how this gonna mess with the people who view chatgpt as actual person and asks it for life advice on everything.

u/droonick

I love it when the AI summary tells me something absolutely and hilariously wrong about a niche subject, while sounding as it has all the confidence in the world.

u/rnilf

> Pew found that just 1 percent of AI Overviews produced a click on a source. These sources are most frequently Wikipedia, YouTube, and Reddit, which collectively account for 15 percent of

u/Interesting_Bar_9371

this does more harm to google than to rddt

u/flirtmcdudes

I’m literally going through this right now. The majority of the main pages for my company haven’t moved down at all in average rank positions in search results, but organic click through rate

u/Grosjeaner

They're gonna introduce watch 30s ads to reveal overview soon.

u/ChillAMinute

In other news, OpenAI announces ChatGPT will begin injecting advertising from conversation related topics into its responses.

u/gamechangersp

There goes adwords business models

u/Nulligun

Queue the people saying it doesn’t actually make you search any faster than plain old google search.

u/bleepbloopwubwub

https://udm14.com/

u/Ashimpto

Google searching has been going quite bad anyway, top results are many times bullshit, it's so monetized that you can't get to info you actually want. Nowadays I think a lot of people aren't

u/Latakerni21377

I've been googling stuff with 'reddit' added, haven't changed that

u/Sensitive_Peak_8204

Yeah it’s a tricky situation. Because they moved away from showing lots of ads on the search page, given how large their network of ad-publishers is. But if pages aren’t being clicked - those

u/userax

>Except it was obvious that you can make profit with Netflix. Maybe they thought it would be smaller than what they lose but still profit. This is easy to say in hindsight but I doubt it

u/anuthertw

We need a new search engine. One that behaves the way Google used to. And no AI

u/Party-Operation-393

This would be a hard pm decision because it comes at the expensive of a major metric. I think for a search user, it’s a better experience than making me do extra work to get an answer to my q

u/-apotheosis-

Yesterday I tried to ask it for information on Ozzy Osbourne biting a dove's head off way before the bat thing happened and the AI overview told me I must be confused because, "Ozzy Osbourne

u/snarkasm_0228

Adding “-ai” at the end of every search always works for me!

u/XMORA

Overviews steal web sites content.

u/AltruisticDealer4717

This actually bother me a lots because Google's profit model is still heavily rely on Ads, and there's little if not zero Ads in Overview compare to the original search result, and overview i

u/311196

And the AI overview is incorrect, so I have to spend more time searching for the correct information.d

u/HoTranBrasky

They have to eat their own lunch before someone else does. The billion dollar question is how do they pivot.

u/Good_Air_7192

Yeah exactly, pay for a biased Gemini result. This is why AI for profit is like the bad things on the internet turned up to 11. People run their Reddit comments through LLMs now because they

u/TheCatDeedEet

It does make you wonder what their end game is. It seems like they actually believe AI could just create all content and they somehow…. Profit… off… that? Or they have no plan at all and are

u/Independent-Day-9170

Extra amusing as Google's "overview" is absolutely worthless, equal parts hallucination and misunderstanding of the top three hits.

u/fullofspiders

It's funny; we're in some ways seeing a temporary de-enshittification of google search. For years, searches have been compromised by SEO, pay-to-play bullshit, and while the AI overviews are

u/actuallywaffles

I was googling someone trying to find an article about them. The AI overview gave me a bunch of info about this person that was blatantly wrong. When I checked the sources it was just piecing

u/turb0_encapsulator

the information is wrong more often than not.

u/gamechangersp

There goes adwords business models

u/Olangotang

Greed. Something must happen to your brain once you get all of this $$$ and power.

u/i_am_not_sam

I automatically ignore AI summaries but it's really really fucking annoying that the search results these days are also mostly AI generated slop with the same nugget of questionable informati

u/Valuable_Tomato_2854

I am 1000% certain we will start seeing ads in LLM chatbot UIs soon. The more daring ones might even start including them in recommendations from the LLM itself for specific topics.

u/cos

Lots of comments here about how bad the AI overview often is, giving you false information in a confident-sounding way. I agree. That's why I reconfigured my browsers & phone to default

u/apetalous42

Google search has been bad for years, the AI answers have never been good. I pay for the Kagi search engine. It has no ads, doesn't track me, and works as well as old Google did. Plus it has

u/PA55W0RD

Google have in the past been quite good at monetorizing what started off as free services and being savvy. I think for the moment they are just making sure they are there at the beginning of

u/Pyrostemplar

And Kodak - they invented digital photography. but it competed with their bread and butter.

u/2Autistic4DaJoke

Important to note the websites that the source data comes from for your answers aren’t getting the “traffic” benefits of those answers that are generated by the AI overview.

u/truthiness-

AI Ads; We can call it, I don’t know, AIDS for short!

u/zertoman

This answer brought to you by Carl’s JR.

u/cos

Lots of comments here about how bad the AI overview often is, giving you false information in a confident-sounding way. I agree. That's why I reconfigured my browsers & phone to default

u/ACCount82

They took our jobs...

u/Inquisitive_idiot

ShiteGpt: “c’mon bro it’s two $hit coins, I know you’re good for it - PREPARE FOR RETINAL SCAN - told you the purchase was gonna be easy

u/Logical_Software_772

So does this mean using AI is bad for SEO?

u/gamechangersp

There goes adwords business models

u/itos

They make a lot of profit from the Google Cloud Platform that sells a lot of AI products, not just the Gemini chat.

u/ChillAMinute

In other news, OpenAI announces ChatGPT will begin injecting advertising from conversation related topics into its responses.

u/rco8786

LLM adwords coming soon, don't worry

u/anuthertw

We need a new search engine. One that behaves the way Google used to. And no AI

u/beggargirl

How to keep cheese from sliding off your pizza

u/KnotSoSalty

I get a ridiculous number of Reddit answers on google.

u/bleepbloopwubwub

https://udm14.com/

u/Jota769

Oh see, you’re under the mistaken assumption that these C-Suites care about the long term health of their businesses. They just want to show short-term growth and cost-cutting, then they’ll

u/effyochicken

It just makes those ads less valuable, and the ones that put your link as a sponsored result at the top on a search page even more valuable.

u/Hatch-Match952531

I just did this search in Kagi using their standard search and the AI summary. The main search returned articles from ctpublic and the reuters with details on the incident. No ads, right to t

u/OverclockingUnicorn

Surely it is also bad for Google ads? Less traffic to sites = less ads served Seems counter to their main business model tbh

u/potatodrinker

Adwords is the old name, changed about 5-6ish years ago. Might take a while for AI overviews to hit advertiser revenues though. AI overviews for research. They seem to show less often, prioi

u/DumbButtFace

How many people are really bidding big dollars on the sort of queries that can be solved from reading a 2 paragraph summary? Most of the money is on transactional keywords. I think Google Ad

u/FamilyFeud17

Will anyone bother to wrote good contents when pages get little views. What contents are AI going to be trained on then?

u/9-11GaveMe5G

Killing your biggest profit center with your biggest loss center is certainly a choice

u/_ECMO_

Except it was obvious that you can make profit with Netflix. Maybe they thought it would be smaller than what they lose but still profit. On the other hand there is no clear path to LLM bein

u/Zookeeper187

It’s obvious what their next monetization plan is. It’s already starting with news like: > OpenAI working on payment checkout system within ChatGPT They will take cuts from sales via the

u/XMORA

Overviews steal web sites content.

u/guitcastro

To be replaced by llm-ads.

u/electricfoxyboy

This would bother me more if the majority of websites weren’t already slop. Top results of nearly every search are rehashed garbage drawn out to fit in more ads and half of them are now AI ge

u/Zookeeper187

If they train models on my shitposting, god help you all.

u/marx-was-right-

All the leadership at these tech companies who would have stepped in and stopped this madness are all either too drunk on their own fortunes to care, or were pushed out by people who were. T

u/TheCountMC

Yup. Google can either lose traffic to a competitor, or retain traffic at a cost to themselves. The latter allows them to figure out a way to keep monetizing.

u/AltruisticDealer4717

This actually bother me a lots because Google's profit model is still heavily rely on Ads, and there's little if not zero Ads in Overview compare to the original search result, and overview i

u/apetalous42

Google search has been bad for years, the AI answers have never been good. I pay for the Kagi search engine. It has no ads, doesn't track me, and works as well as old Google did. Plus it has

u/hillskb

I wish there was a way to turn off AI overview. I scroll past it every time without even reading.

u/actuallywaffles

I was googling someone trying to find an article about them. The AI overview gave me a bunch of info about this person that was blatantly wrong. When I checked the sources it was just piecing

u/Independent-Day-9170

Extra amusing as Google's "overview" is absolutely worthless, equal parts hallucination and misunderstanding of the top three hits.

u/9-11GaveMe5G

From my (outsider) understanding, Google, while technically a single company, is so compartmentalized that they are essentially competing divisions. A good example is why they introduce a thi

u/BigFatKi6

Endgame is to buy OpenAi

u/whichwitch9

Not just that. For example, I was looking for a specific article on a mountain lion that had been hit by a car in CT. I vaguely knew what I was looking for but was short on details. When I t

u/habitual_viking

I’ve been trying to figure out if you can have HomePod only play radio stations from your own county. Not matter how I fucking write the search, Google will only come up with AI overview tha

u/Interesting_Bar_9371

this does more harm to google than to rddt

u/GongTzu

In the last year they have been preparing to fight this trend. If I search for a part number or an EAN code it’s pretty specific, but from showing precise results, I see a lot of junk, that a

u/turb0_encapsulator

the information is wrong more often than not.

Origin Reddit Post

r/technology

Surprising no one, new research says AI Overviews cause massive drop in search clicks

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