Matthew Widdop
Matty is a Digital SEO Executive at Intelligency, helping our clients to improve their digital performance. Matty is currently studying for his Level 3 Multi-Channel Marketer apprenticeship and has completed a Sport Journalism Degree at the University of Huddersfield.
Since their introduction to search in May 2024, AI Overviews have continued to grow in size and dominate Google search. In the past year, AI Overviews have grown by over 50% in terms of their coverage on the SERP. AI Overviews now appear in 48% of searches, meaning almost half of all searches use AI. This is a far cry from the past, where often your organic SEO efforts would see you appearing at the top of the SERP. In this article, we’ll look at what this means for marketers in the space.
Decline in Click-Through-Rate
With AI now dominating search, one of the most notable changes for digital marketers has been a decline in click-through rate. Click-through rate is a metric that tells marketers what percentage of people click on the link after seeing it. Historically, sites that appeared at the top of the SERP would see higher click-through-rates as links higher up the search engine are typically seen as more reliable and trustworthy by consumers. Now that searches are being dominated by AI Overviews, people are often finding the information they need pulled straight onto the SERP without having to click throught onto websites, causing a decline in click-through-rates.
This is especially apparent in certain sectors that answers peoples more informational queries on the SERP as opposed to e-commerce searches, for example. As Roger Monti states in the Search England Journal,
“The education sector experienced the strongest expansion in the number of queries triggering AI search results, from 18% of queries in May 2025 to 83% of queries triggering AI search results by December 2025.”
“Meanwhile, healthcare queries were already triggering AIO results by a large margin since 2024, at a rate of 72% of the time. By December 2025, however, the rate at which healthcare queries triggered AIO edged up to 88%.”
We can see that sectors that strongly favour informational queries are seeing a huge uptick in AI Overviews, which means marketers in these sectors need to try to use AI Overviews to their advantage, by appearing in them, to improve performance going forward.
Greater Competition for Citation
One of the ways to address declining click-through-rates for sites, as mentioned previously, is to appear in the AI Overviews themselves. AI Overviews often collate answers from several web pages and incorporate links showing users where they have collected the information from. However, because AI Overviews use fewer links than traditional Google searches, it is a more competitive space.
One of the ways marketers are finding to appear in AI Overviews is by focusing on answering-based content. Answering users’ questions explicitly and in a clear and concise manner gives marketers a much better chance of appearing in AI Overviews.
What this means for Marketers
Ranking in AI Overviews is fairly similar to ranking in traditional search in that search engines still value authority and credibility of sources, users have to slightly shift how they produce content to more clear answer-focused content that can pull through directly into AI Overviews if they are going to battle a declining click-through-rate.
