The Elephant in the Search Results
Google AI Overviews — the AI-generated summaries that now appear at the top of many search results — have been rolling out broadly since mid-2025. If you're in marketing, you've probably noticed them eating into your search results page real estate. If you haven't noticed, that's also informative.
There's been a lot of speculation about what AI Overviews mean for landing pages. Some of it is sky-is-falling panic. Some of it is "nothing to see here" dismissal. The reality, as usual, is more nuanced.
I want to be honest about what we actually know versus what's still speculation. The data on AI Overviews is evolving fast, and anyone claiming to have it all figured out is selling something.
What the Click-Through Data Actually Shows
The big fear is that AI Overviews will crush organic click-through rates. If Google answers the question directly at the top of the page, why would anyone click through to your site?
Based on the data available — from our own observations, from studies published by Ahrefs, SE Ranking, and others — here's what the picture looks like.
Informational queries are hit hardest. "What is project management?" or "how to write a meta description" — for queries where the user just wants a quick answer, AI Overviews often provide it well enough that clicks drop significantly. Some studies have shown 20-40% CTR reductions for these queries. If your landing page strategy relied on ranking for pure-information keywords, that traffic is eroding.
Transactional and comparison queries are less affected. "Best CRM for small business" or "Mailchimp vs ConvertKit" — these queries trigger AI Overviews too, but users still tend to click through because they want to evaluate the actual product. The AI summary is a starting point, not the destination. CTR impact here is more modest, in the single-digit percentage range from what we've seen.
Brand queries are mostly unaffected. When someone searches your company name, AI Overviews may appear, but the click-through behavior is dominated by brand intent. People searching "Notion" want to go to Notion.
The honest summary: AI Overviews are real, they do reduce clicks for certain query types, but the impact varies enormously by search intent. The death of organic traffic has been greatly exaggerated — but the shift is real enough to warrant adaptation.
What Gets Featured in AI Overviews
When Google generates an AI Overview, it pulls from sources it deems authoritative and relevant. Understanding what gets pulled in — and what doesn't — is critical for landing page strategy.
From analyzing hundreds of AI Overview results across product and service queries, these patterns stand out:
Specificity wins. AI Overviews tend to cite pages that provide concrete, specific information. Pricing details, feature lists, comparison data, factual claims with numbers. If your landing page says "affordable pricing for every team," that's not useful to the AI Overview. If it says "starts at $12/user/month with a 14-day free trial," that might get cited.
Structured content gets extracted cleanly. Pages with clear headings, well-organized sections, and structured data are more likely to have content pulled into AI Overviews. This makes sense — the AI is looking for discrete, citable pieces of information. A rambling paragraph is hard to extract from. A clear Q&A pair or a well-labeled feature section is easy.
Authority still matters enormously. In competitive queries, AI Overviews heavily favor established, authoritative sources. For "best CRM" queries, you'll see G2, Capterra, Forbes, and high-DA review sites cited far more than individual product landing pages. This has implications I'll get to in a moment.
Freshness is a factor. Pages with recent publication or update dates appear to get a slight edge. This is observable but I wouldn't overstate it — content quality and authority matter more. But if you haven't updated your landing page's metadata or content in two years, that's working against you.
How Landing Pages Need to Adapt
Given these patterns, here's what I'd actually change about a landing page strategy. Not everything — most good landing page practice is still good landing page practice. But some targeted adjustments.
Shift keyword strategy toward commercial intent. If you were targeting informational keywords with landing pages ("what is X", "how does X work"), consider building those out as blog content instead and keeping your landing pages focused on commercial and transactional queries where click-through is more resilient. Blog content can still capture traffic from AI Overviews through citations, and it supports your broader GEO strategy.
Make your page the best source of specific information. AI Overviews cite pages that contain the specific data points users need. Make sure your landing page has explicit pricing (or pricing ranges), clear feature lists, specific use cases, named integrations, and concrete differentiation. Vague value propositions don't get cited. Specific ones do.
Invest in third-party presence. Since AI Overviews favor authoritative review sites and publications, make sure your product has accurate, up-to-date profiles on G2, Capterra, Product Hunt, and relevant industry directories. Getting mentioned in third-party comparison articles matters more in the AI Overview era because those articles are more likely to be cited than your own landing page for competitive queries.
Add structured data religiously. Product schema, FAQ schema, Review schema. This helps Google's AI understand and cite your content correctly. It overlaps completely with broader AI search optimization — one effort, multiple channels.
Optimize for the click after the overview. Here's an underappreciated angle: when a user reads an AI Overview that mentions your product and then clicks through to your landing page, they arrive with more context than a typical organic visitor. They know roughly what you do. They're now looking for validation — deeper details, pricing specifics, social proof. Make sure your page delivers on that expectation.
What We Don't Know (Honesty Check)
I want to flag the limits of current understanding, because the overconfident takes annoy me.
We don't know exactly how Google selects sources for AI Overviews. The algorithm isn't published, and it changes. We observe patterns but can't confirm causation.
We don't have great long-term CTR data yet. AI Overviews have been broadly available for under a year in their current form. User behavior may still be shifting as people get accustomed to them. Early CTR drops may stabilize, worsen, or partially recover — we don't know.
We don't know how AI Overviews will evolve. Google is iterating rapidly. The format, length, source selection, and prominence of AI Overviews will change. Strategies that work today may need revision in six months.
What we can say with confidence: the direction is clear. AI is becoming a larger part of how search results are presented. Content that is clear, specific, structured, and authoritative will perform better across every version of this, because those are the qualities that make content useful to both AI systems and human readers.
The Practical Takeaway
If I had to distill this into one strategic recommendation: stop thinking of your landing page as something that competes for a blue link and start thinking of it as an information source that AI systems draw from.
That means being specific enough to be cited. Being structured enough to be parsed. Being authoritative enough to be trusted. And — this is the part that connects everything back to fundamentals — being genuinely useful enough that users who do click through find something worth their time.
The pages that thrive in the AI Overview era will be the same pages that have always converted well: clear about what they offer, specific about who they serve, backed by evidence, and structured so both humans and machines can quickly find what they need.
Check how your page stacks up across all of these dimensions with our Landing Page Analyzer. The content quality and structure signals that drive conversions are increasingly the same signals that determine AI visibility — whether in dedicated AI search engines or in Google's own AI-powered results.