What AI Overviews mean for SEO & website traffic
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Marketing Hub Marketing automation software Free and premium plans Service Hub Customer service software Free and premium plans Content Hub Content marketing software Free and premium plans Revenue Hub CPQ, billing, and payments software Free and premium plans Agent Hub Your central home for building and managing AI agents across the platform Learn more AEO (Beta) Answer engine optimization tools that track and improve your brand's visibility in AI results Learn more Home Marketing What AI Overviews mean for SEO & website traffic What AI Overviews mean for SEO & website traffic Written by: Amy Rigby HUBSPOT AEO TOOL See exactly where your brand shows up in answer engines and take action to close AI visibility gaps. If you’re worried about what AI Overviews mean for SEO, let me remind you of the panic over featured snippets circa 2017. Remember how that turned out? At first, bloggers and SEOs bristled over these quick-glance summaries at the top of the Google SERPs, fearing they’d steal all our traffic. Eventually, however, we adapted and started optimizing content to get mentioned in them. I believe the same will be true of AI Overviews. I mean, it’s already happening: The internet is now filled with the latest advice on how to get cited in AI Overviews (including this article). I wrote this guide for SEO and marketing leaders seeking practical frameworks to overcome declining clicks and optimize content for Google AI Overviews. Find out what triggers an AI Overview, how AIOs will change SEO playbooks, and where AI Overview optimization fits inside an existing SEO program. I’ll include lots of research and examples, too. A 2018 Reddit post about how featured snippets could “kill the regular internet” A 2023 Facebook post from a blogger praising featured snippets and sharing how to capture them AI Overviews are AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of the Google search results page, giving a direct answer to your query, synthesized from multiple websites. There may be a few images, links, and a “show more” button you can click to get more details. You can also click the cited sources to read those webpages. Here’s an example of an AI Overview that the HubSpot Blog shows up in. Notice that HubSpot is featured four times above the fold: as two in-line citations within the AI Overview’s summary, as a clickable snippet to the right of the summary, and as the first blue link in the traditional search results below. Winning the AIO and first position means a brand can multiply the surface area it occupies in Google’s new SERP design. AI Mode, on the other hand, is the full AI chatbot experience of Google Search. You can access it by clicking the “AI Mode” tab at the top of Google. Unlike the one-shot nature of AI Overview, AI Mode allows you to continue the conversation in multiple turns, similar to ChatGPT or Claude. The rest of this article will focus specifically on AI Overviews. Importantly, the links that show up as sources in an AI Overview do not always overlap with the top 10 results on the SERP. That means your webpage can rank number one in Google and still get overlooked for an AI Overview. In fact, a Semrush study of 200,000 AI Overviews found that the number one search result appeared in the AIO only 34% of the time on mobile and 46% of the time on desktop. Because AI overviews seek to instantly and directly answer the query, searchers often do not need to scroll or click further to get their answer. Their query is immediately satisfied. As you can imagine, this can have a devastating effect on click-through rates (CTR) and website traffic. See exactly where your brand shows up in answer engines and take action to close AI visibility gaps. AI Overviews correlate with lower click-through rates and higher zero-click searches, meaning you can expect to see less organic traffic from Google. On queries where AI Overviews appear, average outbound organic clicks dropped 38% and zero-click searches rose from 54% to 72%, according to a working paper published in April 2026 by researchers from the Indian School of Business and Carnegie Mellon University. And AI Overviews are increasingly the norm: As of February 2026, they triggered on nearly half (48%) of tracked queries, according to BrightEdge. And when broken down by industry, that rate could be even higher: AI Overviews triggered on 84% of 1,000 B2B queries analyzed by AEO agency Fan Out. From our own data, HubSpot customer organic traffic was down 27% year-over-year globally as of February 2026 (though I don’t know how much of that, if any, was due to Google AI Overviews). But what I’m saying is this: If you’re seeing consistent declines in traffic, you’re definitely not alone. Not every query will trigger an AI Overview in Google Search. Here’s what we know triggers an AI Overview, based on large-scale studies from Ahrefs and Semrush. The majority of AI Overviews come from informational intent keywords (from top-of-funnel users who just want to learn), but over the past year, AIOs have been moving down the funnel, according to the latest Semrush data. Semrush’s analysis of 10M+ keywords found that the share of informational queries triggering AI Overviews dropped from 91.3% in January 2025 to 57.1% by October 2025. Over the course of 13 months: Informational pages are still the most likely AIO targets, but the gap is closing fast. Don’t assume your comparison, pricing, or branded pages are safe from AIO disruption because, increasingly, they aren’t. Ahrefs found that 57.9% of all question queries triggered an AIO. Further, Semrush found that among the question keywords that triggered AI Overviews in its sample, those starting with “what,” “how,” and “is” appeared most frequently.
Source: HubSpot
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