AI Overviews are not the future of search—they’re already here. Quietly. Strategically. And if you aren’t thinking about them yet, chances are, you’ve already lost ground.
Only 7.5% of desktop queries in the U.S. show AI Overviews right now.
That sounds small. But when those results appear, they dominate the screen and pull clicks away from regular listings.
We’ve seen it happen on pages that once ranked #1—and still do—but suddenly get fewer visits.
You can’t optimize for AI Overviews the way you did for Featured Snippets. But you can influence whether your content is useful enough to be part of the answer.
How? Here are five tips:
Generic content is invisible to generative search
AI Overviews don’t summarize your page. They synthesize across pages.
That means your content has to contribute something specific, structured, and genuinely helpful—or it won’t be picked.
The model isn’t looking for polish. It’s looking for coverage. Not fluff. Not an opinion. Actual substance.
Here’s what that means in practice:
Let’s say you write about “email automation tools.” A surface-level listicle with tools and prices won’t get selected.
But a piece that breaks down tool types, includes workflows, flags limitations, and answers real questions like “Which tools don’t require Zapier?”—that’s the kind of depth the model includes.
And here's what’s wild: over 80% of sources cited in AI Overviews come from deep pages—not your homepage, not your catch-all guide.
These are pages built for a single purpose, living quietly three clicks in, solving one problem completely.
Intent isn’t just a keyword—it’s the structure of your page
Google’s AI doesn’t scan a page the way a human does. It doesn't skim. It slices.
Each section is judged on how well it answers part of a multi-part query. That means if you want to be included, your content has to be modular. Easy to pull from. Clear in headings. Anchored in utility.
We’ve rebuilt pages that ranked well but never made it into Overviews. What changed? Storytelling was replaced with focused micro-sections, supported by a content design that provided the model with a clear structure to follow.
Once that happened, those same URLs started surfacing—not in position one, but above position one.
The bar is much higher than most people realize
There’s this assumption that AI Overviews are pulling from the top 3 results. They’re not. Many links cited don’t rank at all for the query that triggered them.
What that tells you: this isn’t anything about traditional rankings. This is about fitness for purpose.
We’ve seen lesser-known blogs get cited over massive publishers. Why? They focused on a single use case with more precision, used a schema aligned with the query’s context, and spoke the language real users type—not just brand-driven keywords.
In most of these cases, it wasn’t content length or domain authority that made the difference. It was clarity, structure, and how well the page handled a very specific query angle—nothing more, nothing less.
That’s the shift. Authority doesn’t guarantee inclusion. Relevance does.
The win isn’t being selected; the win is being clicked.
Just getting cited in an AI Overview doesn’t mean you’ll see traffic. In fact, in a recent study across 300K keywords, CTR dropped by over 34% when AI Overviews appeared.
But pages included inside the snapshot—those cited right within the AI text—tended to outperform the rest of the organic results.
Visibility wasn’t enough—these results were contextual, directly aligned with the question instead of just appearing beneath it.
So don’t optimize just to appear. Build content that actually earns its place in the answer. When someone sees it in the Overview, it should feel like the obvious next click.
Answer the compound queries no one else is covering
Most AI Overviews don’t show up for short, generic keywords. They appear when people type layered, messy, human questions. The kind you don’t usually optimize for.
Things like:
“Best ecommerce platforms for non-tech founders under $100/month”
“What email software has the best open rates for cold outreach?”
“5-day Spain itinerary starting from Madrid with no car”
These aren’t keywords. Their thoughts. And most content doesn’t target them directly.
That’s your opening.
Instead of just going after “best ecommerce platforms,” create content that responds to a specific, real-world scenario. Not hypotheticals. Not personas. Situations.
AI Overviews actively solve this kind of nuanced query. And when your content uniquely addresses that specific need, you don’t just earn a citation—you claim the spot.
Focused entries can still earn placement, even if you don’t rank for broader terms, because broader competitors often overextend or try to cover everything for everyone.
Final thoughts
Most of the SEO playbooks are out of date now. And the hard truth? You can’t reverse-engineer your way into AI Overviews with checklists.
This shift rewards content that thinks like a user. Content that doesn’t just explain a term, but builds around context, intent, and completion.
We’ve helped teams rethink their site structures, reformat content into snapshot-friendly formats, and close the intent gaps they didn’t know existed. That’s what we’re doing at our end—as a full-stack SEO company in Kolkata that lives in the weeds, not just the pitch decks.
If you’re building content in 2025 the same way you did in 2022, it’s time to have a real conversation.
