Surviving Google’s AI Overviews: The Local SEO Comeback

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AI Overviews Are Stealing Your SEO Traffic — Here’s What You Can Win Back

AI Overviews Are Stealing Your SEO Traffic — Here’s What You Can Win Back

AI Summary

Google’s AI Overviews are significantly reducing SEO traffic, with click-through rates dropping by 30–70% for some queries. “How-to” blog posts are hit hardest, while product and service pages see smaller declines. Local SEO searches such as “plumber near me” currently avoid AI summaries, likely due to the profitability and established role of Google My Business. However, broader location-based searches like “what to do in London” still trigger AI results. AI Overviews appear here to stay, but Google may eventually integrate them into local search to remain competitive.  Read more on ChatGPT

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Some analyses show drops in click-through rates ranging from 30% to 70%, depending on the search query. (Read Rand Fishkin’s Zero-Click Search Study). In the UK SEO industry, Vanilla Circus has clients who have seen an 8-14% drop in traffic. This is less so when search queries are answered with product or service pages The worst hit are the how-to type blog pages, where Google’s AI overviews are proving a much better and informative read than the original single blog. Why, because it is the synopsis of all of the leading (expert) blogs on that subject.

The BBC has a wonderfully alarmest article: Is Google about to destroy the web? Click here.  None of this is actually true, however, Google is happy to trade search dominance for ad click revenue loss.

This answer is direct from the horse’s mouth (Gemini)

So if AI overviews are killing off organic SEO traffic, what has survived Armageddon?

AI overviews are here to stay. 

“You’ll find AI Overviews in your Google Search results when our systems determine that generative AI can be especially helpful. generative AI….Find what you’re looking for faster with generative AI” search.Google.

However, as users have found, not all keywords result in an AI-generated overview. “If Google believes it will be helpful, it will summarise results and kill your traffic“. However, local SEO queries are exempt. Roar Digital gets it wrong when it says that local SEO will have to change forever. More. In fact, there is a lot of AI optimisation misinformation out there. Local SEO queries are not a recognised exemption category from AI summarisation according to Google. However, I could not find out what the ‘exemption categories’ were.

 

What we can see is that for over 100 we tested local SEO searches, there is NO AI Overview

 

Why is this?

Our take on why AI is not triggered on local SEO queries is:

  1. An AI summary would not improve search results. Google already has Google My Business/Google Business Profile (GBP), showing local businesses
  2. Google actively encourages GMB participation
  3. It is a critical pillar in their local search, maps, ads, and AI-driven assistant ecosystem. ChatGPT
  4. The cost to develop, manage and maintain is in the $10ms range
  5. The verbs to ‘google’ and ‘googling’ mainly came from people looking for a local business
  6. To AI summarise local results would be too great a change for current users
  7. AI technicians did not spend their AI brilliance making it easier for users to find the right carpenter in Luton
  8. Google Local is revenue-generating.
    1. It has been sold to ChatGPT as a resource tool to be able to scrape and include in its answers
    2. Advertisers use it

Will it change?

Not in the short term. Google Maps and Google Local data are too expensive to produce and generate substantial revenue for Google. Will AI competitors change the local search engine optimisation landscape? Yes. I believe Google will be forced into some type of AI Google Business Profile summation to remain current. What will that look like?

Adding your web content, product or services into AI results

Want to know how much of a ChatGPT answer is a summarised Google (or Bing) search result and how much is an AI learnt summation?

Have a look a the image below. Blue is from “search results”, yellow is from me (ChatGPT). Simply put, ChatGPT has three abilities.

  1. Scrape information from search results.
  2. The ability to summarise on the fly. I.e. taking a business’ skillset or experience and shortening it into a sentence.
  3. The ability to retain information that has been pre-trained (learnt).
    1. Next steps are always learnt or pre-inputted information.
web content, product or services as as AI answer
“Web content, product or services” as an AI answer

 

AI Systems with Known Search Integrations:

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