You’ve probably seen the big news. Google is rolling out its new AI Overviews, and the chatter online is loud. Some people are excited, but if you’re a business owner who relies on search traffic, you might feel a knot in your stomach. You’re likely wondering what are the negative impacts of AI overviews on SEO, and you have every right to be concerned.

This isn’t just a minor update from the search engine giant. This shift in the search landscape could fundamentally alter how users find information, directly affecting your SEO strategy. It is important to understand what are the negative impacts of AI overviews on SEO to prepare for what’s coming.

Some users are annoyed of AI overviews and trying to find ways to turn AI overviews off, we broke down in another article about how you can turn it off.

We will look at the real, tangible effects that businesses are already starting to feel. It’s time to get a clear picture of the challenges ahead posed by Google’s AI Overviews. This will help you adjust your SEO practices to survive and thrive.

A Serious Drop in Website Clicks is Coming

The most immediate and obvious problem is a significant drop in organic traffic. AI Overviews are built to provide quick, concise answers to a user’s question right on the search result page. When an ai-generated summary provides the core information, why would someone need to click through to your link?

This convenience for the user directly increases what SEO professionals call zero-click searches. A study from years ago showed a high percentage of Google searches ended without a click to a website, and this was before the search generative experience became a default feature. Now, that number is expected to climb even higher, severely impacting click-through rates.

This directly hurts businesses that depend on website visitors for revenue. Reduced organic traffic means fewer leads, lower conversion rates, and less income, whether from ad impressions or direct sales. It’s a simple but brutal equation for anyone invested in digital marketing.

The Fight for a Spot in the AI Overview

You might think the new goal is just to get your website featured in the Google AI Overview. Unfortunately, it is not that simple, and it creates a new layer of competition. Unlike the traditional search results with ten blue links, there is often only one AI-generated answer at the top.

This single block of text, generated by Gemini AI, is now the most valuable real estate on the Google search page. Getting your content to be one of the overviews citations is incredibly competitive and the rules are not yet clear. Google hasn’t been transparent about how its Google algorithm picks the multiple sources it uses for each AI summary.

The factors that help you rank on page one for traditional search might not be the same ones that get you into the ai-generated summaries. This creates huge uncertainty, as years of traditional SEO tactics and link building might not carry the same weight. It feels like trying to hit a moving target in the dark while the target itself is changing shape.

What Are the Negative Impacts of AI Overviews on SEO Strategy?

This change forces a deep rethink of your entire search strategy. The foundational ways we have attracted visitors and built our brands through organic search are now under threat. A changing SEO landscape demands new SEO tactics and a new approach to content creation.

Loss of Brand Voice and Connection

Your brand’s voice is your secret weapon; it’s the personality and style that builds brand authority and connection with your audience. AI Overviews strip all of that away, creating a significant risk for content creators. The AI reads several trusted sources and combines the information into a single, generic response.

Your carefully crafted, authoritative content gets blended into a flavorless soup of information. This means users get the facts but miss the experience of your brand. Over time, this erodes brand loyalty and makes building a lasting relationship with customers much harder, a core tenet of modern content marketing.

Misinformation and Factual Errors

Let’s be blunt: generative AI makes mistakes. These systems have been known to “hallucinate,” or confidently state things that are completely wrong. We’ve all seen the screenshots of Google’s AI suggesting people put glue on pizza or that geologists should eat rocks.

We noticed some hallucinations happening for one of our SEO client in Mount Pleasant, SC so we found ways to correct the information with accurate information.

This is a huge problem. If your website is cited as a source in an incorrect AI Overview, it could seriously damage your reputation, linking your brand to bad information even if your original article was accurate. The current AI models are not foolproof, and this creates a new liability for websites that publish original content.

For businesses in critical industries like finance or healthcare, the risks are even higher. A study on AI’s medical accuracy found significant variability, highlighting the danger of relying on these systems for important advice. Bad advice from an AI search, wrongly attributed to your site, could have serious real-world consequences.

Difficulty Measuring Performance

How do you prove your SEO efforts are working? You usually point to metrics like SEO traffic, click-through rate, and conversions. AI Overviews throw a wrench into all of that, making performance measurement a significant challenge for any SEO agency or in-house team.

If clicks go down, demonstrating the value of your SEO work becomes much harder. Right now, Google Search Console does not offer a clear way to see if you were featured in a google ai overview. You might be contributing to an answer and gaining visibility, but you will have no solid data to prove it.

This makes it difficult to justify an SEO budget or refine your SEO strategies effectively. Without clear data, you are left guessing about your impact, which is a terrible position for any business. The lack of analytics for the search generative experience is a major blind spot.

Who Gets Hurt the Most by This Change?

While this update from Google’s AI affects everyone, some businesses will feel the pain more than others. The playing field is not level; it is tilted away from the smaller players and content-focused websites. These are often the very businesses that provided the foundational content for the internet.

Many risk losing a significant portion of their search traffic, which can be devastating. As Google continues to refine its ai search capabilities, the impact on different sectors will become clearer. However, initial trends show clear vulnerabilities for specific types of websites.

Business Type	Primary Negative Impact	Why It Hurts
Informational Blogs & Publishers	Massive Traffic Loss	Their business model relies on ad revenue from page views. AI-generated summaries provide answers that will cause traffic to plummet.
Small to Medium Businesses	Increased Competition & Uncertainty	They lack the budget to adapt to unclear algorithm updates and compete for the single AI spot against massive corporations.
Niche & Affiliate Sites	Long-Tail Keyword irrelevance	AI directly answers the specific, long-tail and informational keywords that these sites once dominated, reducing their primary source of traffic.
E-commerce Stores	Reduced Product Discovery	Users asking “best product for X” get an ai summary, not your curated category page designed to guide them through their options.

Publishers and content creators are in the direct line of fire. An initial analysis from one SEO firm predicted that AI Overviews could cause a 25% or greater drop in organic traffic for many search terms. Imagine losing a quarter of your website visitors overnight; for sites dependent on advertising, that’s a potential death sentence.

Small businesses, including those focused on local SEO, also have a tough road ahead. They do not have the massive brand recognition of a global corporation and have relied on smart SEO to get in front of customers. Now, with searches result in direct answers, they are at risk of becoming invisible, even in their own communities.

So, What Can You Actually Do About It?

Feeling a bit of panic is understandable, but despair is not a strategy. The game is changing, which means we have to change with it. There are still ways to build a strong, resilient business in this new landscape by adapting your content creation and digital marketing efforts.

Your first move should be to double down on your brand. If people can’t find you through generic searches, make them search for you by name. Build a community on social media, engage with your audience, and develop an email newsletter to give them a reason to come directly to you.

Next, focus on developing content that AI cannot easily summarize. The goal is to create content AI struggles to replicate because it lacks simple, extractable facts. This means shifting away from simple informational content toward more complex and experience-based material.

• Publishing your own unique research and proprietary data.
• Writing detailed case study examples with real-world results.
• Sharing powerful personal stories and customer experiences.
• Conducting interviews with other experts in your field to offer unique perspectives.
• Creating interactive tools or calculators that provide personalized value.
• Producing high-quality video content that shows, rather than just tells.

This type of authoritative content provides value that a simple ai-generated summary cannot replicate. It establishes your deep expertise and gives people a compelling reason to visit your site. It’s a move toward building a destination, not just a stop for information.

You must also learn how to structure content for the new reality. Using clear headings, bullet points, and schema markup might help Google’s AI parse your information correctly and potentially favor your site for overviews citations. This is an area of technical SEO that will require experimentation.

Finally, do not put all your eggs in one basket. Google is just one channel. A strong business should have multiple ways to reach customers. An email list, in particular, is an asset you own and control completely, a direct line to your audience that no google algorithm update can take away.

Conclusion

There’s no sugarcoating it; the rise of AI Overviews from Google AI is one of the biggest shake-ups the search world has seen. The challenges are real, from dramatically reduced organic traffic and the homogenization of information to the very real threat of AI-driven misinformation hurting your brand authority. For many small businesses and creators, this feels like an existential threat.

We’re seeing impacts on some of our SEO clients in Charleston, SC, so we are staying ahead of the curve by making sure the information is accurate and traffic is still increasing.

But understanding what are the negative impacts of AI overviews on SEO is the first step toward building a more adaptable marketing plan. This is a critical moment to pivot from traditional SEO tactics that only chase rankings. The focus must now be on building a brand so strong that you do not have to rely on being an anonymous blue link on a search results page.

The future of SEO will belong to those who can create valuable experiences, publish original and proprietary data, and build direct relationships with their audience. While Google searches will continue to change, a loyal community and a strong brand are assets that will endure any algorithm update. The time to adapt your SEO strategy is now.