Put glue on your pizza so the cheese stays on. Eat a small rock a day.
Those are among the answers Google's new AI Overviews gave some users this past week, and screenshots of them have circulated widely on social media. Today, Google published a post explaining what went wrong and what it has changed. Two weeks ago, at I/O, the company announced that the overviews were being rolled out to everyone searching in the U.S.: a generated answer at the top of the results, above the ten blue links that businesses and SEO professionals have long worked to reach.
Many SEO professionals expect the feature to be withdrawn. We consider that unlikely. Google has been testing it for a year as the Search Generative Experience in Search Labs, and a few embarrassing answers are unlikely to make it abandon the project. The feature is not yet available in Canada, but we recommend planning as though it will arrive.
What do AI Overviews change for small websites?
For years, the arrangement with Google has been fairly simple. You write a good page, Google ranks it, people click, and some of them become customers. The click was the whole objective.
AI Overviews disrupt this model for certain types of searches. When someone asks "how long to drive from Montebello to Ottawa" or "what's the difference between a gîte and a B&B," the overview provides the answer directly. The user reads it and leaves. Your page may have been the source, and you may even receive a small link, but fewer people click through.
The sites most exposed are those that rely on simple informational content: recipe blogs, how-to pages, generic "10 tips" articles. In short, any content whose answer fits in two sentences.
Local businesses whose customers are ready to act have far less cause for concern. Nobody books a cabin from an overview. Customers still need your page, your photos, your prices and your phone number.
How should a page be written to remain visible?
The first practical change is simple: place the answer near the top of the page.
A great deal of web writing, including some of our own in the past, takes three paragraphs to reach the point. This has never served readers well, and it is now a greater disadvantage. A page that answers the question in its first few lines, in plain language, has a better chance of being understood, quoted and linked.
- Use a heading that matches the question people actually type.
- Answer it in one or two sentences directly under that heading.
- Then provide the details, the exceptions and the nuances.
This is the same FAQ logic that proved effective during the period of strong interest in voice search, and it is relevant again.
Which pages get cited in AI Overviews?
An examination of the pages linked in the overviews that users have shared reveals a clear pattern. Generic content gets summarized. Specific content gets cited.
If your page says the same thing as fifty others, the model does not need it; it can produce that content itself. If your page offers something others do not, there is a reason to point to it: your own prices, schedules and conditions; photos you took of your actual premises; numbers you collected yourself; the perspective of someone who has done the work for years.
Local detail is particularly valuable. A gîte or an outfitter in rural Quebec already knows things that no large national site knows: what the trails are like in April, which road deteriorates after the thaw, what the lake is like in early June. We recommend documenting this knowledge on your site. Others cannot reproduce what they do not know.
Do the business profile and structured data still matter?
Yes. The overviews do not replace the local pack or the map. For "near me" searches, your Google Business Profile still does most of the work, so it should remain complete and accurate. Adding structured data to your site ensures that the basic facts (name, address, hours, services) are unambiguous. None of this is new. It is the foundation, and many small businesses have not yet put it in place.
Which indicators should be tracked in Search Console?
Tracking clicks and impressions, rather than ranking alone, is the change in approach that will take the longest to adopt.
A page can rank first and still lose clicks, because an overview above it has already answered the question. A ranking report on its own therefore becomes less reliable. A business may see "position 1" and still wonder why the phone is not ringing.
We recommend tracking the following in Search Console:
- Impressions, to confirm that your pages are still being shown.
- Clicks and click-through rate, to confirm that people are still visiting.
- Queries where clicks decline while impressions remain stable. This often indicates that an element above your result is answering on your behalf.
One limitation should be noted: based on our observations, Search Console does not provide a separate report for the overviews. Everything is included in the regular web search figures. Trends must therefore be interpreted with care, which is a sound practice in any case.
The most important indicator is not in Search Console at all: calls, bookings, emails, and customers coming through the door. If those remain stable while clicks decline, your business is in a sound position. The lost clicks most likely came from people who were not going to buy.
What steps do we recommend for this summer?
Start by reading Google's own presentation, which is short: Google's May 2024 announcement on generative AI in Search. It is written with great confidence. The pizza glue answers appeared about a week later, which illustrates the limits of launch announcements.
Next, review your five most important pages. Does each one answer its main question in the first lines? Does it offer information that a competitor's page does not? If not, that is the priority project for the summer, and it is work that only the owner can fully carry out.
The trend we observe is that thin, generic articles written to capture traffic are losing their value; they were already in decline. Pages written by someone with genuine knowledge of the subject are well positioned, and may even perform better than before. If you would like support in planning optimizing for AI search, we can help, although most of the work begins with the owner documenting what they already know.