You’ve probably noticed something different about Google lately. Search for something like “best email marketing software for small business,” and before you reach the usual organic results, there may be an AI-generated summary sitting near the top of the page. That’s an AI Overview — Google’s way of answering your query without making you click on anything.
When these summaries first rolled out widely in 2024, they mostly appeared for informational searches. How-to questions, definitions, quick factual lookups. Annoying for publishers who lost clicks, sure, but the impact on businesses selling products and services was limited. That’s no longer the case.
Throughout 2025 and into 2026, Google has expanded AI Overviews into more commercial and transactional searches, including the queries people make when they’re comparing products, evaluating services, and getting ready to buy. BrightEdge data shows AI Overviews appearing on nearly half of its tracked queries by early 2026. And the types of searches they’re showing up for have shifted toward the ones that can drive revenue for your business.
If you’re a business owner, marketer, or entrepreneur who relies on organic search traffic to generate leads and sales, this shift deserves your attention. Here’s what’s happening, how much traffic is at risk, and what you can do to stay visible.
The numbers are moving fast. In Semrush’s analysis, the share of AI Overview-triggering keywords with commercial intent rose from 8.15 percent to 18.57 percent. These are comparison searches people run when they’re narrowing down options, like “best email marketing software” or “top CRM for small business.”
Transactional-intent keywords moved even faster in the same Semrush dataset, rising from 1.98 percent to 13.94 percent of AI Overview-triggering keywords. These are searches with direct purchase intent, such as “buy iPhone 16 Pro” or “pricing for QuickBooks Online.” It might sound modest, but consider the volume. Out of 20.9 million shopping keywords analyzed in one Visibility Labs study, 2.9 million triggered an AI Overview. That’s roughly one in seven shopping keywords in that dataset where Google inserted an AI-generated answer above the usual search results.
The category that’s seen the most explosive growth is “best [product]” queries. If you run a review site, publish comparison content, or rely on ranking for terms like “best project management tool” or “best accounting software for freelancers,” the shift is hard to ignore: AI Overviews now appear on 83 percent of these queries, up from 5 percent just one year earlier.
And it’s not just comparison and purchase searches. Semrush also found that navigational searches triggering AI Overviews rose from under 1 percent early in its dataset to 10.33 percent by October 2025. That means even when someone is searching specifically for your brand, Google might serve up an AI summary that keeps them on the search results page instead of sending them to your site.
The Traffic and Revenue Fallout
When Google answers before anyone clicks a link, fewer visits can make it back to the sites that created the content. In Seer Interactive’s analysis of informational queries, organic click-through rates for queries with AI Overviews fell from 1.76 percent to 0.61 percent. Ahrefs also found a sharp drop, reporting a 58 percent reduction in clicks to top-ranking content when AI Overviews appeared.
Paid ads aren’t immune either. Seer Interactive’s research found that paid click-through rates fell from 19.7 percent to 6.34 percent in queries with AI Overviews. If you’re running Google Ads to compensate for organic losses, you’re dealing with the same search results page where Google is giving users more information before the click.
A Pew Research Center analysis of more than 68,000 Google searches found that users clicked on a traditional result 8 percent of the time when an AI summary appeared, compared with 15 percent when no AI summary appeared. That’s a major drop in click behavior, and it lines up with the lower-click pattern we covered in our AI Overview CTR study.
For publishers and content creators, the revenue impact can be brutal. Publisher lawsuits make the revenue pressure more concrete. Penske Media, which owns Rolling Stone, Billboard, and Variety, alleged in its lawsuit that its affiliate revenue had fallen by more than a third from its peak as search traffic declined. The logic is straightforward. When Google provides product comparisons, pricing, and shopping links directly on the results page, there’s less reason for a shopper to visit a publisher’s review page first.
Some of the biggest names in content have been dealing with steep search losses. Business Insider’s organic search traffic fell 55 percent between April 2022 and April 2025, according to Similarweb data cited by The Wall Street Journal. HubSpot also became a widely discussed SEO example after third-party tools suggested a major blog traffic decline, though HubSpot has pushed back on the simplest version of that story and argued that the shift is more about moving from raw traffic to influence. Pew Research Center also found that around two-thirds of the Google searches it studied ended without a click to a traditional result.
For small businesses, the impact is less dramatic in raw numbers but potentially more painful in proportion. If you’re a local accounting firm that’s spent years building up your rankings for “best small business accountant in [your city],” an AI Overview summarizing the top options could mean the difference between a steady stream of inquiries and a quiet phone.
Google’s Monetization Play
Understanding why Google is making this shift requires following the money. Google Search revenue hit $63.07 billion in Q4 2025 alone, a 17 percent year-over-year increase. The growth accelerated throughout the year, climbing from 10 percent in Q1 to 17 percent in Q4. At minimum, Google’s results don’t support the idea that AI search is hurting its search business.
The reason is simple: this isn’t just about answers. It’s about commerce. Ads now appear inside AI Overviews, and as of December 2025, they’ve been expanded to 11 countries beyond the United States, including Canada, Australia, India, and Singapore.
Google has also been testing shopping ad formats inside AI Mode, its more conversational search experience. In this mode, shoppers can have back-and-forth conversations about products, see curated recommendations with pricing and reviews, and compare options without leaving Google.
Behind the scenes, a massive infrastructure supports this. Google’s Shopping Graph contains 50 billion product listings with 2 billion updated every hour. In January 2026, Google announced its Universal Commerce Protocol, a framework designed to enable checkout on eligible product listings inside AI Mode and Gemini. The direction is hard to miss: the company that built its empire by sending traffic to the open web is building more of the buying journey into its own products, from discovery and comparison to checkout.
The Legal and Regulatory Pushback
The pushback has been swift and serious. A growing wave of legal and regulatory action is now challenging how Google uses publisher content to power AI Overviews.
Penske Media Corporation, the company behind Rolling Stone, Billboard, and Variety, filed an antitrust lawsuit in September 2025. Their core allegation: Google coerces publishers into providing content for its AI systems without compensation, then uses that content to reduce the traffic those publishers depend on. Chegg, the online education company, filed a similar lawsuit in early 2025 after its stock price fell dramatically alongside plummeting search referral traffic.
The legal pressure isn’t limited to the US. In December 2025, the European Commission launched a formal antitrust investigation into whether Google violated EU competition rules by using publisher and creator content for AI purposes without appropriate compensation or viable opt-out mechanisms.
The AI Overview opt-out issue is particularly thorny. During federal antitrust testimony in May 2025, a DeepMind vice president acknowledged that while publishers can opt out of DeepMind’s AI training, that opt-out doesn’t extend to Google’s search division, the division that actually powers AI Overviews. Publishers who thought they’d protected their content discovered they hadn’t.
The scale of content extraction has also drawn scrutiny. Cloudflare has argued that the old search value exchange has weakened sharply. Its CEO said Google went from roughly two pages scraped per visitor sent a decade ago to about six pages scraped per visitor today. In Cloudflare’s view, Google is extracting far more value from publisher content while returning far less traffic in exchange.
Whether these legal challenges will result in meaningful change remains an open question. The Harvard Journal of Law and Technology has published analysis examining the antitrust case against AI Overviews, and some legal scholars argue that there’s no established legal right to traffic. But the pushback from individual publishers, major media corporations, and European regulators suggests this issue is far from settled.
What You Can Do About It
AI Overviews in buying queries probably aren’t going away. Google has invested too heavily in this direction to reverse course quickly. The question for your business isn’t whether to fight the change. It’s how to adapt so you remain visible in this new environment.
Make Your Content Easier to Understand and Cite
Content that answers a question directly is easier for both readers and search systems to understand. A useful pattern is to start important sections with a concise answer, then expand with examples, caveats, and supporting detail. Don’t write only for extraction. Write so the page is genuinely useful even if the reader lands halfway down.
Schema markup can still help because it gives search systems clearer information about your page, product, author, organization, and FAQs. It doesn’t guarantee AI Overview visibility, but it removes ambiguity and can make your content easier to interpret.
Build Authority and Keep Content Fresh
A single blog post, no matter how good, rarely earns consistent AI citations. What works is topical authority: having a cluster of useful, interlinked content around a core topic that shows depth, consistency, and real expertise.
Freshness is also critical. Content you published in 2023 and haven’t updated is already losing ground. Recent, well-maintained content is a safer bet, especially when the topic changes quickly. Regular updates also show readers and search systems that your information is current and reliable.
Trust signals are becoming harder to ignore. Clear author information, real credentials, original examples, updated facts, and visible expertise can all help search systems and readers understand why your page deserves attention. They won’t guarantee AI citations, but thin anonymous content is a much weaker bet in this environment.
Rethink Your Traffic Strategy
Here’s a stat that should reshape how you think about SEO: BrightEdge found that only 17 to 38 percent of pages cited in AI Overviews also rank in Google’s top 10 organic results. Ranking number one no longer guarantees you’ll appear in the AI summary above it. Traditional SEO and Answer Engine Optimization are becoming two related but distinct disciplines.
There’s a silver lining in the data, though. Brands that do get cited in AI Overviews can gain a real competitive advantage, especially when the citation reinforces trust before the user reaches the traditional results. Visibility in AI summaries may not always produce the same kind of traffic as a blue link, but it can influence who gets considered.
Brand-building also offers a buffer. Branded searches, where someone types your company name, are less fragile because the searcher already has you in mind. People who already know and trust you are more likely to click through regardless of what Google’s AI says. This is where search everywhere optimization becomes useful: building visibility through social media, email, community, partnerships, and other channels that make your business less dependent on any single platform’s algorithm.
The Bottom Line
Google’s expansion of AI Overviews into buying queries isn’t a future scenario to monitor. It’s already here, and it’s reshaping how customers find, compare, and purchase products and services online. The businesses that treat this as a wake-up call by restructuring their content for AI citation, building genuine authority, and diversifying beyond Google dependency will maintain more of their visibility. Those that keep running the same SEO playbook from 2023 may become easier to miss in the searches that influence revenue.
The good news is that adapting doesn’t require a massive budget or a team of specialists. It requires understanding what Google’s AI is looking for, structuring your content accordingly, and committing to the kind of genuine expertise and freshness that both AI systems and human readers reward. Start with your highest-value pages, the ones that drive the most revenue, and work outward from there.
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