SEO in the age of AI Overviews: what changed
What changed in SEO with AI-generated answers: the real figures, the difference between SEO, AEO and GEO, what content gets cited, and what has not changed at all.
AI-generated results have, in two years, changed what a search page looks like. The answer appears at the top, compiled from several sources, and the organic results have moved below it. The consequence is measurable and it is unwelcome: more and more searches end without anyone visiting a site at all.
This article explains what has really changed, what the new terms mean (AEO, GEO), what kind of content gets cited and what simply gets absorbed. At the end we look at what has not changed — and that list is longer than it seems. We have included our own Search Console data exactly as it stands, including the unflattering part.
Contents
- What actually changed
- The figures
- Is SEO still worth it if nobody clicks any more
- SEO, AEO and GEO
- Eleven-word queries
- What content gets cited and what gets absorbed
- Structured data has become a priority
- Entity and authority
- What you measure now
- Case study: our own data
- How to write an article that can be cited
- What changes in the content plan
- What has not changed
What actually changed
Three things, in order of impact:
1. The organic position moved down. The result that was in first place now sits below a block of generated answer. Same position, different visibility.
2. Simple questions no longer produce visits. Someone searching “what does LCP mean” gets the answer directly. They have no reason to go anywhere.
3. A second audience has appeared. Alongside people, your content is read by systems that compile answers. They do not “visit” — they extract and, sometimes, cite.
What has not changed
Queries with commercial intent — the ones where someone wants to buy, to compare suppliers, or to find out who to call — still produce clicks. Nobody appoints an agency from a generated summary.
That is the central distinction of this article: generic informational content has lost. Commercial content, and content with information of its own, has not.
The figures
What the public data shows:
- Almost 70% of Google searches end with no click through to a site.
- On queries where a generated answer appears, the click-through rate of the first organic result falls by up to 58% — from around 7.3% to 1.6%.
- The average typed query has reached about 11 words, and 23 by voice, against 3–4 five years ago.
Sources: eSEOspace(opens in a new tab), Conductor(opens in a new tab), evergreen.media(opens in a new tab).
How to read them
These figures circulate as an argument that “SEO is dead”. They do not say that. They say that the volume of traffic for a certain kind of content has fallen — the kind that answers simple, factual questions a model can summarise correctly.
A site that lived on “what is X” articles has been hit hard. A site that lived on service pages with commercial intent, much less so.
Is SEO still worth it if nobody clicks any more
Yes, but the emphasis has moved. It is worth it above all for queries with commercial intent, which still produce visits, and for being the cited source in generated answers — a citation brings fewer clicks than a first position did three years ago, but it brings recognition and qualified traffic. What is no longer worth it is generic informational content, written to catch a simple question.
The correct restatement of the objective
Not “how do I get to position 1”, but: how do I become the source everyone cites when this subject comes up. That includes your position in Google, but also your presence in generated answers, in discussions, in other people’s articles.
SEO, AEO and GEO
Three terms used interchangeably that describe different things.
| Term | What it pursues | How it is measured |
|---|---|---|
| SEO | that the page is found and ranked in the search index | position, impressions, clicks |
| AEO — Answer Engine Optimisation | that your snippet is chosen as the direct answer | appearances in featured snippets |
| GEO — Generative Engine Optimisation | that your source is cited in generated answers | mentions and citations in assistants |
What they have in common
All three require the same thing at bottom: clear, well-structured, verifiable content on a technically accessible site. They are not three strategies; they are three consequences of the same work done well.
The practical difference is in form, not substance:
- For SEO: structure, addresses, internal links, speed.
- For AEO: short, self-contained answers immediately under headings phrased as questions.
- For GEO: information others do not have — your own figures, case studies, measured data.
Eleven-word queries
The change with the most direct consequence for how you write.
Nobody searches “website price” any more. They search “how much does a business website cost for a small company in Constanța”.
What that means for the structure of an article
Headings become complete questions. Not “Prices”, but “How much a business website costs in Romania”.
Under each such heading, a self-contained answer of 40–60 words. Self-contained means it makes sense taken out of context, with no references of the “as we showed above” kind.
The rest of the section elaborates. The short answer is for whoever wants it quickly; the detail is for whoever stayed.
Why it works
A short, complete block immediately under an explicit question is easy to extract — by a search engine, by a model, and by a person scanning the page. It serves all three audiences at once.
Every article on this blog has at least one such block. You can spot it: it is the section whose heading is a complete question.
What content gets cited and what gets absorbed
The most useful distinction in this whole article.
Absorbed (brings no more traffic)
- Definitions and explanations of general concepts.
- “What is X” for any well-known X.
- Lists of generic tips, available on fifty other sites.
- Summaries of other articles.
- Content containing nothing that could not have been generated without it.
The test: if a model could write your article without having read it, there is no reason to publish it.
Cited (brings recognition, sometimes traffic)
- Your own data. Figures you measured yourself.
- Case studies with names and numbers. What you did, what changed, by how much.
- Direct experience. “Across 155 projects, we noticed that…”
- Specific local information. Prices from a particular market, regulations from a particular country.
- Methodology. How you did something, step by step, reproducibly.
- Reasoned positions. An argued opinion, even one against the consensus.
The consequence for the content plan
Every article needs at least one element a model cannot generate on its own. Without it, the article is an addition to someone else’s corpus, not an investment of yours.
It is a useful constraint: it stops you publishing articles on which you have nothing to say.
Structured data has become a priority
What used to be a “technical bonus” has become infrastructure.
Why. A system compiling an answer looks for information it can validate. Structured data declares explicitly what is on the page, who the author is, what company is behind it, what services it offers, what questions are dealt with.
The priorities, in order:
OrganizationorProfessionalService— identifies the company as an entity, with verifiable details.FAQPage— on the FAQ page. The best effort-to-result ratio.Service— on every service page.BreadcrumbList— on any page below the root.BlogPosting— on articles, with author and date.
Implementation details in The SEO structure of a business website.
Entity and authority
A search engine tries to understand who you are, not just what you write.
What builds an entity
- Consistent company details everywhere: name, address, phone, tax number, identical on the site, in the business profile, in directories.
- The structured data that declares them explicitly.
- An identifiable author on the content, with a page saying who they are and why they would know the subject.
- Mentions in other sources — even without an active link, a mention of the name counts.
- Thematic consistency: a site that has written about web design for years is an authority on web design.
Why it matters more than before
When a system chooses which sources to cite, it prefers identifiable ones. A company with verifiable details, a history and a clear specialisation is a safer choice than an anonymous site.
The practical consequence: write the “About us” page as if it were being read by someone deciding whether to believe you. Because it is.
What you measure now
Positions and clicks remain, but they are no longer enough.
| Indicator | What it says | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Impressions | you are visible | Search Console |
| Average position | how high | Search Console |
| Click-through rate | is visibility turning into visits? | Search Console |
| Clicks | real traffic | Search Console |
| Direct and branded traffic | recognition | Analytics |
| Searches for the company name | you are sought as an entity | Search Console |
| Mentions in AI assistants | are you cited? | manual check |
| Conversions from organic | what actually counts | Analytics |
The indicator that matters least
Position on a single keyword. It is a measurement from another era: it is personalised, it varies geographically, and it no longer corresponds to a single experience of the results page.
The indicator that matters most
Click-through rate. It tells you whether visibility is turning into anything. A low rate on high impressions is the most commonly ignored problem, because it does not hurt — nothing simply happens.
The manual check in assistants
Every few months, ask an AI assistant something your site ought to be a source for: “what web design agencies are there in Constanța”, “how much does a business website cost in Romania”. See what it answers and whether you appear. It is rudimentary, but it is the only direct method available at the moment.
Case study: our own data
We publish our figures exactly as they are, including the bad part. They make a good teaching case precisely because they are not flattering.
The period: 3 July – 29 August 2026, 58 days, the digital-art.ro domain.
| Indicator | Value |
|---|---|
| Impressions | 11,349 |
| Clicks | 23 |
| Click-through rate | 0.20% |
| Average position | ~21 |
What it means
Nearly 200 impressions a day and less than half a click. The site is visible, but not attracting clicks.
The detail that says everything: a single page — the business website design page — produced 9,280 of the 11,349 impressions, with zero clicks, from an average position of 19.75.
The three conclusions
1. Position 20 does not exist commercially. It is visibility with no consequence. The difference between position 19 and position 8 is not proportional — it is the difference between nothing and something.
2. Click-through rate is a problem separate from position. A term where we appear at an average position of 3.58, with 352 impressions, produced zero clicks. At position 3. That is not a ranking problem, it is a problem of title and description — of what the person sees in the list of results.
3. Old content holds up. The two articles published in 2024 and abandoned since sit at positions 8.82 and 10.41 — better than almost any commercial page on the site. Useful content has no expiry date.
What we did with that information
We rewrote the titles and descriptions on all ten service pages before publishing a single new article. It is the cheapest possible intervention and, at 11,349 impressions, the one with the greatest potential effect.
The next report, in a few months, will say whether it worked. We will publish that one too.
How to write an article that can be cited
Applied, not theoretical. Six writing rules that follow from everything above.
1. A self-contained answer under every question
The heading is a complete question. Immediately under it, 40–60 words that answer it completely, without depending on context. No “as we showed above”, no “in this case”.
The test: take the paragraph out of the article and read it on its own. Does it make sense? If not, it cannot be extracted.
2. The figure before the explanation
“LCP has to be under 2.5 seconds” is citable. “LCP should be as low as possible” is not.
Whenever you have a threshold, a price, a duration or a proportion — state it explicitly. An article with no figures in it is an article with nothing to cite.
3. The source, with a link
When you take a figure from somewhere, say where. Not out of politeness — because a claim with a source is verifiable, and systems prefer verifiable sources. And because, if the figure changes, you know where to update it from.
4. Tables for comparisons
A table is explicit structure. Three paragraphs of prose comparing two options are hard to extract; a two-column table is not.
5. Your own data, marked as such
“In migrating this site, out of 181 MB of files only 35 were real content” is a claim nobody else can make. Mark it as direct experience: “we measured”, “in our case”, “across the 155 projects”.
6. Visible updating
An article with a recent update date and current figures is preferred to one from 2021. The updated-date field exists; use it when you genuinely revise the content, not as a trick.
What not to do
Do not write for machines. A text full of short definitions and lists, with no voice, is unpleasant for people to read and no more citable for it. The question-and-answer format is a structure you add to a good article, not a substitute for one.
What changes in the content plan
The practical consequence, at the level of strategy.
Fewer articles, more substantial
One article a month with data of your own beats four a month without. Volume is no longer an advantage: generic content is exactly what has become free and instant.
The filter before writing
Before every article, one question: what does it contain that could not be generated without me?
Valid answers: figures I measured, a project I did, a procedure we use, prices from our own market, a local regulation I have read.
If you do not have an answer, do not write the article. Someone else will write it, better or worse, and it will not bring traffic anyway.
Updating beats publishing
An article that brings traffic and has figures from two years ago deserves more effort than a new article on an adjacent subject. Update it, add new data, note the revision.
Commercial pages remain the priority
The blog feeds the service pages; it does not replace them. If your main service page sits at position 20 with the wrong title, no article makes up for that.
We made exactly the opposite mistake for a long time: three well-written articles from 2024, ranking at positions 8.82 and 10.41, while the page producing 82% of the site’s impressions had a description copied from the text of a card.
What has not changed
The reassuring part, and the longest one if you read everything above in perspective.
Good content wins. What has changed is the definition: “good” no longer means “correct and complete”, but “correct, complete and containing something you cannot find elsewhere”.
Structure matters just as much. One page per search intent, a clear hierarchy, stable addresses, internal links. None of that has changed.
Speed and accessibility matter just as much. Perhaps more: a site an automated system cannot work through cannot be cited either.
Commercial intent still brings clicks. Someone who wants to buy comes to the site.
Authority is built over time. There is no shortcut, and there never was.
Local is still the best investment for a services company. Local searches have strong intent and less competition.
The practical conclusion
Do not change the strategy. Raise the bar. Publish less and more substantially, with data only you have, structured so it can be extracted, on a site anyone can read — human or machine.
Want to know where you stand? Write to us — we will look at your Search Console data and tell you where the problem is: in position, in click-through rate, or in the content. Those are three different problems, with three different solutions.
Read next: The SEO structure of a business website, Website copy and How we migrated a site without losing rankings.