Author: Ryan Walsh

Date 06/05/2025

Subject: Artificial Intelligence, SEO, Google

Google AI Overview searches are a buzzword within many SEO companies, tech businesses, and anyone who gains sales online. So, this impacts many industries, and it’s been widely reported that 75% of all problem-solving queries now feature an A. I overview. So now, this time, to learn more about this vital change, Google is making.

We shall state how it’s changing digital marketing, and why we are the company to talk to when your business wants to generate more sales online.

 

Within this article, we shall discuss:

What are Google AI overviews?
What does AI mode mean?
FAQ regarding Google AI overviews
How artificial intelligence is changing search engine optimisation
First things first

In this guide, we will discuss how AI Overviews by Google is a relatively new search feature which creates AI-generated summaries. These summaries are formed by often reading multiple pages and then forming a detailed yet succinct answer in the SERP.

Many businesses call this “synthesised answers”- where Google takes advice from multiple pages and generates an answer.
This article will explain why traditional SEO ranking factors, such as links and well-written content marketing, are still essential.

Why are businesses researching AI overviews so much?

For over a decade, businesses globally have used Google AdWords to reach the top of Google’s results. Then, there are the Google Business results (if you are looking for a local company) and the 10 organic links below. But now there’s something new that’s disrupting, well, not just search engine optimisation, but the whole world, and that is AI.

 

Therefore, AI overviews result in shoppers directly obtaining answers in the SERP.

Thus, this results in more “zero-click searches” being generated.

A zero-click search is when the shopper selected no business/website because Google answered the shopper’s query directly in the SERP.

Race to be there
However, if your business is selected at the AI Overview and a link is provided (source), this can drive traffic to your website. This is why businesses, as you would expect, are scrambling to try to get their companies mentioned in the Google AI Overview results.

Break it down, what are AI Overviews?

AI Overviews was first launched by Google back in 2024.

This feature changes the SERP, that’s search engine results pages, by providing an AI-generated answer right at the top of Google’s results. Usually, the answer is “synthesised”, which is formed by checking multiple pages and then generating a short but exact answer.

What is your agency’s opinion on Google’s AI changes?

From a customer perspective, getting an answer to a query makes it a piece of cake, which helps people save time.

Therefore, a shopper doesn’t have to click on multiple websites to find an answer. Some businesses don’t have to be ranked at the top of

Google.co.uk to get more shoppers to their website, so you might say it’s a win/win?

Therefore, if your business uses content marketing to form the AI Overview answer, your website is mentioned as a source.
This link allows the shopper to read more. Therefore, this could potentially draw in considerable traffic to your company’s website.

 

What is a multi-source summary?

Before, businesses generally hired marketing agencies/consultants to get them to the top of Google’s organic results. Some help was also needed to get enterprises to feature in Google’s Business results.

This is still the case, with many companies also investing in Google AdWords.

But now there’s something new: instead of the result being connected to one company, “Mult-source Summaries” in the form of Google AI overviews often are a blended answer formed from multiple businesses.

Businesses often want to be featured as a source of that helpful advice. To do this is very hard, as Google decides which websites it gains the answer from. However, it now means more than ever that if your website’s content marketing is the best in the business, it’s more likely to be used, again rewarding you with even more visitors, if your business is mentioned as a source.

 

How can we better optimise our website so that it is more likely to feature as an AI Overview?

Longtail keywords and optimise your content marketing for a wide range of FAQS.

No matter which products or services your business offers, customers will have many questions regarding that item or service.

Therefore, if you write articles and offer helpful advice, this work could be featured in Google AI Overviews. There is an overlap between this and organic search engine optimisation because the work that ranks highly on Google will be the work that is helpful and has a high Google EEAT score.

So, here at this agency, you must understand two crucial Google updates. The first is the “Google Helpful Content Update,” which was important. You should also know about the Google EEAT update.

 

What does Google EEAT stand for?

It simply stands for “Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness and Trustworthiness”; therefore, if you improve the Google EEAT score, you stand a better chance of your business appearing higher in the organic results and the Google AI Overviews.

 

Why is it essential to write FAQ style content marketing?

We think here at this agency that the best content marketing is long-form content marketing, which means text with a high word count.

However, the content marketing should also be written in an FAQ style if you want to stand a better chance of being used as an AI overview.

This stands to reason.

For example, let’s say you’re an online retailer and focus most of your effort on link building, so the “authority” aspect of Google E-EAT is powerful.

Well, that’s all well and good, but what if the product pages don’t offer detailed product descriptions? We think you are, therefore, as a company, limiting your opportunity of being displayed in the Google AI overviews.

Now, oppose this with a different SEO strategy:

Let’s say you write long-form blog posts and build a comprehensive FAQ page, and the product pages are beefed up at the bottom with FAQ-style content marketing.

 

Then three things happen:

1) You’re making your website more helpful, so you are therefore satisfying the Google Helpful Content Update
2) You’re improving the Google EEAT score by demonstrating more knowledge, experience and expertise regarding the products/services you’re selling
3) You’re providing more text, which Google may use in the Google AI overviews.

 

Use more long-tail content marketing across your company website

Well-written content marketing with a hefty word count will help improve your chances of your business appearing more often in the Google

AI Overview results.

 

What does Google AI mode mean?

AI Mode is a feature Google Labs offers.
Chatbot-like environment.
After seeing how Google’s Gemini 2.0 feature works, our agency and many others believe that the future of search will operate like a “chatbot-like environment”.

 

In summary:

What are Google AI Overviews?

Google AI Overviews are, therefore, a relatively new feature that Google offers. This could result in many more zero-click searches, where shoppers can obtain answers to a question directly in Google’s SERPS.

Is it possible for a business to optimise its content marketing for Google AI overviews?

Here’s how our agency believes your business stands a better chance of featuring as an AI overview:
Use more conversational language
Therefore, write the content marketing in FAQ format and write the advice as if you are offering it to a real person in the same room as you.
Be original

What’s for sure is that Google will not use duplicate content marketing in its AI Overview. It will often have millions of businesses to choose from. Therefore, the pages selected for a Google AI overview always have a high Google EEAT score, plus are original.

 

Does Google list its sources?

Yes, Google AI Overviews can often provide a bulleted list, which lists the sources which Google uses to form the answer.

What’s the overall aim?

As you probably have experienced, we often spend much time visiting various websites to find an answer. Since the Google Hummingbird update, the answers have become more exact. Yet, Google AI overviews take things to the next level, saving a searcher time visiting multiple websites to find an answer. Instead, directly in the SERP, right at the top, is typically just a paragraph of text which answers the query.

 

Will an AI overview appear for every query?

The simple answer is no, an AI overview won’t appear for every query. Google, therefore, selectively selects which queries it will supply an AI answer to.

 

How can we increase our business’s chances of appearing as an AI Overview answer?

 

Crawlable and indexable

Googlebot must be able to crawl and index the page to be used as a Google AI Overview. This is the same for organic results, so regularly check your SEO tools, plus Google Search Console, and look for any indexation issues that could be causing your page not to be indexed.

 

What could cause no-indexation issues?

Pages with 4xx errors could cause no indexation issues, no-index tags your web designers added by accident, and an incorrectly written

Robots.txt file, for example, could cause no indexation issues.

The Robots.txt file could be blocking access.
This is the file that Google reads and gets instructions from regarding which pages should be indexed and crawled and which shouldn’t.

 

Quality content marketing

Content marketing must be superb for businesses to organically appear at the top of Google or be featured as an AI overview.

Google has so many businesses it can now use; therefore, when writing content marketing, you must aim to answer questions better than your competitors.

Plus, because the existing pages at the top of Google most likely have a high dwell time, which has been gained over a very long period, this is another reason why a business must aim to be better than the existing content marketing by some way, if you are to rank higher than those businesses which may held the top positions on Google for sometime.

 

YMYL content marketing

Your money or your life content marketing, this content marketing will need to be very well written, with the page having a high Google EEAT score for it to appear as a Google AI overview answer.

 

Is on-page SEO still important?

When we think about AI, which is artificial intelligence, we may think that this means that traditional and established on-page SEO ranking factors are now less critical. However, this is not the case; you must use good on-page SEO methods, which are still an important ranking factor.

 

Helping Google to understand your content marketing better

Chatgpt and Google Gemini are extremely intelligent and offer a massive leap forward in terms of how people can gain answers to their questions.

However, we SEO companies still have to ensure that the on-page SEO is done right, so that Googlebot and Google’s algorithm will understand the page and what the content marketing is about.

So, do make sure to use the best white hat methods, and optimise your website in the following ways:
– Add title tags
– Add well-written meta descriptions
– And a descriptive URL slug
– Add heading tags H1, H2, H3.
– Use white hat methods to optimise your website’s content marketing
–

 

Are backlinks still part of SEO?

So, this is a growing question.

Businesses are wondering if Google is using this AI more and more. Well, will backlink building still be important?
Or will Google AI know with the flick of a switch which businesses are the most important, so backlinks are unnecessary?

Well, like most SEO agencies, we can only speculate, as we all know Google keeps how its algorithm works a very closely guarded secret.

However, if you were to ask us, we would say that links will still be important because backlinks have been considered the number one and most important ranking factor for over a decade.

If you were to ask us to have our penny’s worth, we would say backlinks will be part of Google’s algorithm shortly. However, UX and shopper engagement will become more critical than ever.

We mean that backlinks will most likely be essential in evaluating part of the Google EEAT score.

However, the shoppers will dictate how well you answered the query. For example, how long did they spend on the website? (Dwell time).

Will Google’s AI Overviews now replace featured snippets within the organic results?

We don’t think so, but only time will tell.

Many businesses use schema markup, which sometimes generates a featured snippet in Google’s organic results.

We also think, at least for the time being, there will be a clear separation between the AI Overview answers and the organic results. Therefore, the algorithms powering the two sets of results are possibly entirely different.

How often does Google display AI Overview answers?

SEMrush has recently published data, which states that AI Overviews currently account for around just 6.71% of search queries in the U.S.
However, if we were to have a good guess, we would say globally that this figure will only increase in the future.

 

Does your business need to generate more sales?

We are a Cardiff-based search engine optimisation company.

We are established, and the business is run and managed by Ryan Walsh, one of Wales’s best and most well-known SEO experts.

We have experience helping a wide range of businesses, from e-commerce companies to local businesses.

We have monthly retainers available starting from 1k PCM.

If you would like a no-obligation quotation, ring us today.