Still get found in the age of AI search.

You can still get found in the age of AI Overviews, but fewer searches end in a click, so each page has to earn its visit. When Google shows an AI summary, people click a regular result on 8% of visits instead of 15%, according to Pew Research Center.

What still works is content an AI answer cannot replace or has to cite: original data, first-hand experience, clear answers and a brand people look for by name.

Google says there is no special SEO for AI Overviews. The same indexing and quality rules apply, including to AI-written pages. Here is what the numbers say, what Google says, and how to measure progress when clicks are no longer the whole story.

01What AI Overviews did to clicks

Three independent studies, using different methods, point the same way.

Pew tracked the browsing of 900 US adults in March 2025. About 18% of their Google searches showed an AI summary. With a summary, 26% of visits ended the browsing session, against 16% without one.

Ahrefs compared 300,000 keywords using Search Console data. In December 2025, an AI Overview went with a 58% lower click-through rate for the page ranked first, up from 34.5% in its April 2025 study.

Seer Interactive followed 53 brands and 5.47 million queries. Organic click-through on queries with an AI Overview hit a low of 1.31% in December 2025 and recovered to 2.36% by February 2026. Queries without an Overview stood at 3.82%.

Google disputes the gloomiest readings. In August 2025, Liz Reid, head of Google Search, wrote that total organic clicks from Search were “relatively stable year-over-year” and that Google now sends slightly more “quality clicks”. The post did not include figures, so treat both sides as partial views.

02What Google says about AI-written content

Google does not penalize content for being written with AI. Its guidance, updated December 10, 2025, asks for accuracy, quality and relevance, “especially when automatically generating the content.” That is a different question from whether a detector can prove your writing was AI-assisted, which our review of AI detectors covers.

What Google treats as spam is scale without value. Its spam policies list “using generative AI tools or other similar tools to generate many pages without adding value for users” as an example of scaled content abuse.

Google’s people-first content guidance suggests asking “Who, How and Why” about every page. Under “How”, it asks whether the use of automation, including AI generation, is clear to visitors “through disclosures or in other ways”. For product listings, AI-generated images need IPTC TrainedAlgorithmicMedia metadata, and AI-written product titles and descriptions must be labeled.

03Do you need special SEO for AI Overviews?

No. Google’s documentation says “there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary.” A page must be indexed and eligible to show a snippet, which is the same bar as a regular result.

Google also says you “don’t need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup” for these features. AI Overviews and AI Mode use what Google calls query fan-out: they run several related searches across subtopics, which can surface a wider set of pages than one results page would.

You can limit how your content appears with nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet or noindex, but these also affect your regular listing. The separate Google-Extended control covers Gemini training and grounding, and Google says it “does not impact a site’s inclusion in Google Search.”

Other assistants, such as ChatGPT and Perplexity, use their own crawlers and rules. Our guide to getting cited by AI search covers them.

04What still works in 2026

The pages that hold up share a few traits. None is new, but each matters more when an AI answer sits above you.

1. Original information. Google’s first question for helpful content is whether a page provides “original information, reporting, research, or analysis.” Your own survey, test results or pricing data give an AI answer something it has to cite.

2. First-hand experience. Google’s quality framework, E-E-A-T, stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust, and Google says “trust is most important.” Show that you did the thing: photos, measurements, the mistakes you made.

3. Clear structure. Put the answer in the first two sentences, use specific headings and keep one page per question. In a KDD 2024 study, making text more fluent and easier to understand raised visibility in AI answers by 15 to 30%.

4. A brand people search for. In an Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands (December 2025), mentions on YouTube and across the web correlated strongly with visibility in AI answers, while backlinks correlated weakly. Ahrefs itself notes that correlation is not causation.

5. Pages worth the click. An AI summary can explain a topic. It cannot run your calculator, book your service or show your portfolio. Build pages that do something, and make each visit count with a landing page that converts. Our playbook for AI in marketing covers the rest of the funnel once visitors land.

05How to measure SEO when AI answers first

Rankings alone now hide what is happening. Track these instead:

• Search Console. Traffic from AI Overviews and AI Mode is counted in the Performance report under the “Web” search type, mixed in with regular results. Watch for pages whose impressions hold steady while clicks fall.

• Referrals from assistants. ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to the links it sends, so those visits show up clearly in tools such as Google Analytics.

• Bing’s AI Performance report. Since February 2026, Bing Webmaster Tools has shown, in public preview, how often your pages are cited in Microsoft Copilot and Bing’s AI summaries, and for which queries. It counts citations, not clicks.

• Brand searches. Track queries that include your brand name. They show whether people are looking for you specifically.

• Monthly spot checks. Ask the assistants your customers use the questions your pages answer, and note who gets cited.

Answer this question as you would for a customer: [the question your page answers].
Search the web first. List every source you used, with its full URL.

Run it in each assistant once a month and keep the results in a simple sheet. Answers vary between runs, so look for the trend, not a single result.

06FAQ

Next, learn how to get cited by ChatGPT and AI search, or build a website with AI that is ready for both.