So what happens when Google search results go completely AI? What will the appearance of AI-generated topic summaries in search, or what Google calls “AI summaries,” mean for SEO, referral traffic, and brand discovery more broadly?
These are the questions many have after Google announced its new Gemini-based generative search experience. ChatGPT-like responses appear in searches.
As you can see from these examples, the new search experience, already rolling out, will provide generated answers to some queries ahead of actual website links.
The first example above provides tips on how to clean your couch, the second provides a list of yoga studios in a particular area, and the last is an example of how the system can provide instructions based on image input.
And in every instance, the response provided ends up taking traffic away from the website.
In some cases, that might not be such a bad thing. Over time, the web has become optimized for long-tail search queries, and in an attempt to drive traffic, there are tons of pages providing answers to common questions. Some of them are good, some not, but with the advent of generative AI for text, these responses are more likely to be AI-generated and may link to spam sites.
So having a centralized summary of answers from trusted sources might be better, at least in some cases.
However, this can also undermine the website traffic strategy of those who follow general best practices and provide detailed answers to these types of questions on their site. While responding to all relevant queries is a good way to increase website traffic and, ultimately, business, providing that same information directly in the SERPs dilutes its effectiveness and makes it a less viable SEO approach.
Perhaps other SEO processes will emerge as a result. It’s important to note that these AI-generated summaries won’t appear for every query, but only for those that Google detects as good candidates for these responses.
But regardless of size, it will have an impact and will change the SEO game in at least some ways.
It will also be a problem for websites like Wikipedia that get a lot of their traffic from matching information searches: 80% of Google search traffic is information searches, not transactional (products) or navigational (“near me” searches), and as many of these searches are now answered in-stream with more detail, it will reduce the need for users to click to learn more, further limiting browsing.
But at the same time, Google knows how valuable search is to their core business and the need to maintain direct links within the SERPs.
Google even tried to downplay these concerns in its announcement, saying:
““AI summaries are driving people to a wider variety of websites for answers to more complex questions, and the links in the AI ​​summaries are receiving more clicks than if the pages had appeared as traditional web listings for that query.”
See, your traffic will increase, not decrease.
That said, I wouldn't bet on it, but in theory it's still possible that if Google were to use its usual ranking algorithms to determine the origins of the answers it generates and include links to those sources in the summary, some people might tap in to find out more.
If they wanted to. I would guess that many queries are also pretty shallow, so users wouldn't have to read too deeply to understand. But Google is basically saying that there are still ways to generate traffic, and that the impact will be smaller than we expect.
However, it seems unlikely that there won’t be some impact, and depending on the scale of these new AI overviews, the reduction in referrals could be significant.
But if the top matches continue to be highlighted in the overview, this may not be as big a change as some expected.
You'll see it soon.