How AI is reshaping online search behaviour
Google accounts for over 90% of searches in the UK and the average person is said to make between five to ten searches a day. However, its search volumes are now at their lowest since 2015 – signalling a shift in user behaviour.
The boom in AI has transformed how we source information. Chatbots like ChatGPT are changing the landscape, offering quicker and more definitive answers than traditional search engines.
The introduction of AI overviews
Google’s primary revenue stream is advertising. In 2024, over 200,000 UK businesses used its search advertising to reach customers. Losing users means reduced platform traffic, which lessens Google’s value to advertisers.
To counter this, Google introduced AI Overviews – quick, AI-generated summaries that appear above traditional results. These provide users with concise answers, often including links to relevant websites.
Around 1.5 billion people use AI Overviews each month. As a result, click-through rates from search results have fallen by nearly 30% in the last year. Whilst clicks are fewer, they’re likely more targeted, with users spending more time on sites they do visit.
This change challenges the value of SEO. Companies investing heavily in keyword strategies and onsite content now face a simplified reality: either you’re in the AI answer, or you’re not.
Reshaping the competitive edge
A recent report analysed 300,000 keywords and found that the presence of an AI Overview in the search results correlated with a 34.5% lower average click-through rate (CTR) for the top-ranking page compared to similar informational keywords without an AI Overview. A lower CTR results in less organic traffic being directed to websites, thereby increasing the competition for paid visibility.
AI Overviews will keep users on Google’s platforms and away from publishers’ websites, where Google can reduce organic traffic and maintain control over user attention. This could direct more advertisers towards higher-paid Google ad placements to recover lost organic traffic, forcing brands to increase ad spending with Google to maintain visibility. The company is claiming high-value ad inventory by prioritising its AI features, reshaping the competitive landscape to favour its own products and requiring other advertisers to adapt.
How can you increase your business’s coverage in search?
AI summarisation is disrupting everything we know about online search.
Today’s faster AI agents want to find results more quickly and prefer more digestible content. Over 80% of Google advertisers already utilise some form of AI-driven advertising technology, suggesting that the industry is ready for more AI integration.
The idea of success is changing and increasingly depends upon captivating coverage in the overviews that appear at the top of the page.
If your website utilises SEO to enhance brand visibility or relies on traffic and ad revenue for its income, you will need to adapt as well. As the framework for search as we know it changes, your best lever for growth is content – not just any content, but content that AI sees as helpful, credible and worth including.
When you have longer content, ensure you outline it with subheadings and structure it in a way that follows a question-and-answer approach. If you’re asking questions in your copy, try to implement those questions into the sub-heads as well. As a publisher, you have limited control over how your content appears in search and AI results.
If you are a consumer brand, a well-structured FAQ section on your website is the best way to influence the AI overview, as it matches and replicates how people use search engines.