AI Overviews: Are They Affecting Your Search Results? — Whiteboard Friday

The last thing I want to talk about is who is actually appearing in AI overviews. 

So at the moment, we see on average about 6.4 links out, so links to third-party websites from AI overviews. We currently consider there to be two types of links in AI overviews. There’s the preview links that look almost like a mini search result with a thumbnail, often an image normally on the top right. And then there are little links, normally with just a chain link symbol in the text, which don’t actually link directly out. You sort of click on them, and then it opens a preview box, and then you have to click through again. So if we were to only count the big ones that look like a regular search result, it’s more like three, three links out per search result. 

And similarly, if we look at these 6.4 links out, all of them, only about 52% of those will also be ranking in the organic top 10 on the same keyword. So that’s quite a low overlap with regular organic. That suggests that maybe your regular SEO strategies aren’t going to work. But again, if we only look at the preview links, that goes up to more like 80%. So there’s a big difference there. If we’re only interested in those preview links, which are the most visually obvious and the most direct click-through, you have sort of a much stronger correlation with regular organic ranking. And that hopefully brings us more towards the situation we’re used to with featured snippets, where these days the way to appear in a featured snippet is basically to rank first. 

The other thing I want to call out, and it’s sort of related to these points above, we do typically see a lower Domain Authority and Brand Authority for sites that are appearing in the AI overview, just slightly than for sites ranking in organic top 10. And that probably goes to the fact that they’re not ranking in top 10, Google is digging deeper in the SERP to get some of these sites. So it’s not surprising that they perform worse on some of these stats. 

So what can we take away from this? As I said, the main thing to think about is if you are losing clicks, and it’s by no means to be taken for granted, but if you are losing clicks to AI overviews, what kind of clicks were they? How does that fit into your overall strategy? What kind of channels would you replace them with? Because it’s unlikely to be uniform throughout your funnel. 

And obviously, this affects some kinds of businesses much more than others. If you’re a publisher, you might be playing almost exclusively in informational searches, and if so, that is a challenging place to be. The bar is definitely rising for the complexity of a question where people are expecting to click through to another website. It’s something I’ve spoken about before. 

Similarly, if you’re trying to rank in the AI overviews, at this point, I would say it’s getting increasingly to the point where you’re not doing anything special to do that. I mean, I’m not saying it’s easy, but it aligns increasingly closely with your regular organic. So hopefully that removes some of the complexity for you. 

I hope that’s been useful. I look forward to your feedback and any other thoughts you might have. Thank you very much.

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