Google AI Overviews Now Appear in 47% of Results - Gemini 2.0 to Expand AI Overviews to More Queries

[Ryuzaki]

As a sign of things past and still to come, AI Overviews now appear in 47% of search results and thanks to Gemini 2.0, this will expand to cover a higher quantity and a higher complexity of queries. This research was conducted by Botify and DemandSphere over 120,000 keywords, between August and September.

Other tidbits of info:

• AI Overviews now reach over 1 billion users.
• AI Overviews can eat up to 76% of the mobile screen space above the fold.
• 75% of the websites cited in the AI Overviews rank in the top 12 organic results. Double dipping!
• Content that semantically matches whatever ends up in the AI Summary is more likely to be cited. This is correlation, though you could use what gets spit out in the AI Overview in your own content to try to put your finger on the scale.
• 60% of searches now are resolved without users clicking links.

Busting out some other data:

• Keywords under 1,000 monthly search volume show AI Overviews 55% of the time.
• Long-tail keywords of 5+ words show AI Overviews 73.6% of the time.
• Commercial intent keywords show AI Overviews 19.4% of the time.
• Info keywords show AI Overviews 58.7% of the time.

More details from the study:

• Google, when crawling, misses 50% of the pages on "large" websites.
• Bing fails to crawl 20% of the pages that get organic traffic from Google. They're even more selective, as we know.

The Gemini 2.0 search updates are coming in early 2025. These "more complex" queries are stuff like math problems, coding problems, and multimodal (images, video, audio, text, text-to-speech) searches. The 2.0 Flash version outperforms the 1.5 Pro version on key benchmarks at twice the speed.

Been saying it for years since the Knowledge Graph started... Google knew a long time ago they wanted to become an answer engine and not a search engine, which is why they slowly were training people above the fold to use their "no click" search features. This is also why they're now tanking the quality of their search results with largely only a handful of whitelisted sites. It will cause people to interact with their "no click" features more.

AI Overviews, Knowledge Panels, Shopping, Google My Business, and Ads, all above organic listings, and those organic listings already appear in the AI Overview. How much traffic does that leave the rest of the internet from Google? I have to say, when it comes to actual research, I go straight to Yandex now. Wild to say. Google will offer like 15 images while Yandex will give me thousands. Google will offer sometimes 20 articles on big pre-approved sites that say nothing, Yandex hundreds like the good old days.

Interesting times we're in!

 

[chubes]

There is a lot to unpack with this stuff.

I wonder if society will have a need or desire for a traditional search engine in the future.

Maybe an "answer engine" is what people want?

Or will people not be satisfied with this direction, stop using Google, and make space for an alternative to rise up?

How are people going to find things on the internet if we no longer have the ease of searching for it?

Do people actually need to find things on the internet, if Google can provide them with everything?

I wonder if the internet will actually change to become unrecognizable from its current form, like CCarter suggested elsewhere. Maybe websites really will become a relic of the past?

I don't have answers, just pondering it. These truly are interesting times.

 

[Ryuzaki]

I wonder if the internet will actually change to become unrecognizable from its current form, like CCarter suggested elsewhere. Maybe websites really will become a relic of the past?

Ultimately in the next few decades I imagine we’ll be using the metaverse (the internet upon which shared spaces are built like websites you visit). Zuckerberg is mentally way ahead of the curve in this. He wants to own the metaverse framework. It’ll be like owning the internet, possibly getting royalties.

We’ll social media in the metaverse. We’ll go to work in it. We’ll go to drive in theaters with friends and crowds. We’ll game in it. Some will go to their worship services in it. All from home with goggles on.

That’s what I see in the next 30 years. In the next 29 I see people somewhat reject AI creeping in where it shouldn’t. I see personal brands rise. I see over-personalization of “search” results get disregarded as people long for exploration of information rather than having something spoon fed to them, though that obviously has its place.

As Google purposefully implodes its search engine, others can maintain a healthy business while maintaining a classic search engine. Because otherwise we kill the flow of information and personality and human connection. Society doesn’t want that. We’ve reaped insane rewards by having it and I’d say everyone sees it even if they can’t articulate it.

 

[CCarter]

So this guy is experience EXACTLY what we all knew was going to happen with Google A.I. overview. Tons of Top #1 positions, still climbing, but click-thru to his website are falling off the map.

The reality is there is no solution. Google A.I. overview is pretty decent. I find myself reading it more than ever clicking through a website. Only when I get the feeling what it's telling me is wrong do I bother scrolling further.

And then the next generation use TikTok for searching for stuff - no one wants to read.

If you are in eCommerce or selling a specific service you have a chance. But a blog... forget about it.

You knew you were already dead, but now whoever is last to leave the SEO room, turn off the lights.

 

[secretagentdad]

^^^ go check your brand keywords.
On top of this they're doing sneaky ad serving on brand keywords.
If you turn on country filters for just the usa / money markets it gets even more obvious. (in search console)

 

[BakerStreet]

So this guy is experience EXACTLY what we all knew was going to happen with Google A.I. overview. Tons of Top #1 positions, still climbing, but click-thru to his website are falling off the map.

The reality is there is no solution. Google A.I. overview is pretty decent. I find myself reading it more than ever clicking through a website. Only when I get the feeling what it's telling me is wrong do I bother scrolling further.

And then the next generation use TikTok for searching for stuff - no one wants to read.

If you are in eCommerce or selling a specific service you have a chance. But a blog... forget about it.

You knew you were already dead, but now whoever is last to leave the SEO room, turn off the lights.

It is not game over. The game just changed.

Here is my opinion:
1.) You need more starting capital than before to succeed. Same amount of competition but less traffic means you need more starting capital to pass the break even point.
2.) Established players have huge advantage than new companies. There was a huge first mover's advantage here.

How does one adapt to this? Here is an idea:
1.) move-in house. You can't be your own boss with SEO but you can be managing someone elses' SEO. They will have more capital (#1) and probably are already established (#2).

On top of pure SEO skills, you'd need these new skills to adapt:
1.) likability - it matters in in-house roles
2.) office-politics skills - it matters at the C-level
3.) presentation skills - it matters at c level
4.) planning and budgeting skills - it matters when planning an SEO operation for a team and presenting it to investors.

And, of course, you can be an over-employed SEO director. That's fair game.

What else are you gonna do? File for welfare?

 

[bernard]

I only use Google now to find specific things, more like the phone pages of old and when I want to read something that isn't filtered through ChatGPT, but ChatGPT can also search and present the sources.

I will say my Google use has probably declined 95% and I'm not exaggerating.

Instead, my other consumption of information has shifted a lot to Substack and I'm paying on/off several subscriptions, from $5 to $20 a month. I also still subscribe to newspapers.

This fits with what I've seen as the development over the last 5 years, it's not what, it's who. Personal branding is everything and people want to increasingly support it. There's also a strong backlash against AI content, but the average person hasn't learned to detect it yet at all. You see that on social media all the time.

Where is the AI content going to come from in the future? Likely places such as Substack.

 

[BakerStreet]

I only use Google now to find specific things, more like the phone pages of old and when I want to read something that isn't filtered through ChatGPT, but ChatGPT can also search and present the sources.

I agree. in the future, inbound marketing with a blog would be relegated as legacy media just like the phone book, TV ads, and radio. The cost to produce content would decrease due to AI. The cost to buy a link would decrease too, due to automation as well. The only ranking factor that you can't manipulate easily is chrome traffic, which ends up being a huge ranking factor.

 

[bernard]

I agree. in the future, inbound marketing with a blog would be relegated as legacy media just like the phone book, TV ads, and radio. The cost to produce content would decrease due to AI. The cost to buy a link would decrease too, due to automation as well. The only ranking factor that you can't manipulate easily is chrome traffic, which ends up being a huge ranking factor.

Also that AIs can increasingly just deduce if a person is a trustworthy source. It's very easy to ask an AI if a page seems legit. It is good at that, not yet great, but it can definitely do it. The idea that you will be able to fool Google/Perplexity/ChatGPT for whatever traffic it sends is very unlikely in the future. There's no way around UX, wrappers on AI and good personal marketing as I see it. It will likely also decrease the competition in the "make money online" space by huge numbers.