AI Overviews & SEO in 2026 | What's Changed for Search

By 2026, a meaningful share of Google searches return an AI-generated summary before any traditional result appears, and chat-based tools like ChatGPT and Gemini have become a genuine, if smaller, discovery channel in their own right. For small businesses, the anxious headline version is that AI is killing search traffic. The more accurate version is more specific — and considerably less alarming for local businesses.

What actually changed

AI Overviews sit at the top of Google's results page and answer the query directly, often pulling and summarising information from several sources at once. For a purely informational question — "what temperature should a fridge be", "how long does grout take to dry" — the AI Overview frequently contains the whole answer, and a meaningful share of searchers no longer click through to any website at all. That's a genuine change, and publishers of purely informational content have felt it directly.

Chat-based search behaves differently again — someone might have an extended conversation with an AI tool, get recommendations mid-conversation, and never touch a traditional search results page for that particular need. It's a smaller volume of overall search behaviour than Google itself, but it's growing, and it doesn't show up in tools designed around traditional search analytics.

Which queries lose clicks, and which don't

The pattern that's emerged is fairly consistent: queries with a single, self-contained factual answer lose the most traffic, because the AI Overview simply is the answer. Queries with local or commercial intent — "plumber near me", "boiler service St Ives", "best kitchen fitter Cambridge" — are far more resilient, because the whole point of the search is to choose a specific supplier, not to receive a fact. An AI summary can tell someone what a boiler service typically involves; it can't do the choosing and booking for them.

This is the detail that gets lost in the "AI is killing SEO" narrative. It's overwhelmingly the top-of-funnel, purely informational searches that have lost clicks. Bottom-of-funnel, local, ready-to-buy searches — the ones that actually matter commercially to most small businesses — have held up much better, because they were never really "answer" queries in the first place.

How to be the cited source

When an AI Overview does cite sources, or when a chat tool references a specific business, the pattern behind what gets picked looks a lot like good SEO always has, just with slightly different emphasis:

Content that answers a specific question directly and early, rather than building up to the answer after several paragraphs of preamble.
Clear heading structure that mirrors how people actually phrase questions, making it easy for a crawler — human or automated — to locate the relevant section.
A genuine FAQ section addressing the exact questions people ask, in the wording they'd use.
Structured data (schema markup) that describes what the page and business actually are in a format machines can parse reliably, which we cover in schema markup for local businesses.
Credible authorship and clear, accurate information about who runs the business and where — the sort of thing that separates a page an AI system trusts from one it treats cautiously.

There's no separate submission process or paid route into AI answers — it's the same fundamentals of clear, well-structured, crawlable content that have mattered for years, applied slightly more strictly.

Google Business Profile and reviews still carry weight

For local queries, AI-generated answers lean heavily on the same signals traditional local search always has — Google Business Profile information, review volume and content, and consistency of business details across the web. A profile with accurate categories, regular updates, and a healthy volume of specific, recent reviews remains one of the strongest levers available, arguably more so now that it's feeding both the traditional map pack and AI-generated local answers from the same data. Our guide to ranking higher on Google Maps in 2026 covers this in more depth.

Measuring the effect on your own site

The clearest signal of AI Overviews affecting a page is a gap opening up between impressions and clicks in Google Search Console — a query still shows the page appearing (impressions holding steady or rising) while clicks for that same query decline. That pattern usually means an AI Overview is now answering the question before anyone reaches your result.

It's worth checking this at the query level rather than the site level, because the effect is very uneven — some pages see almost no change while others, usually the more generic informational ones, see a real drop. Our guide to checking your Google ranking explains how to read Search Console data properly if you haven't used it much before.

Should you block AI crawlers?

Some larger publishers have started blocking AI crawlers to protect content from being summarised without a click-through. For a small local business, that trade-off rarely makes sense. Blocking crawlers doesn't bring back the clicks lost to AI summarisation of factual queries — it simply removes you from an increasingly used discovery channel entirely, on both the local and informational side. The traffic you'd protect by blocking is usually smaller than the visibility you'd lose by disappearing from AI-generated answers altogether.

What hasn't changed

Underneath the new results page format, the inputs are largely the same as they've always been: relevance to what someone actually searched, clarity of the content, technical health of the site, and a credible, well-reviewed reputation. What's changed is the shape of the results page and the fact that being the source an AI system chooses to cite now matters in addition to ranking as a traditional blue link — not instead of it.

If your site is already built around clear structure, honest content and solid local signals — the fundamentals of any decent SEO approach — the shift to AI-driven search results is more of a change in presentation than a reason to start again.

Common questions

Are AI Overviews killing website traffic?

They reduce clicks on purely informational queries, where the answer fits in a paragraph. Local, commercial and 'near me' searches still send people to websites and profiles, because the whole point is to choose a supplier.

How do I get cited in AI Overviews?

The same fundamentals: clear, well-structured content that answers a specific question directly, credible information about who wrote it, structured data, and a site that can actually be crawled. There's no separate submission process.

Should I block AI crawlers?

For a small local business, generally no. Being absent from AI answers means being invisible in an increasingly used discovery channel, and the traffic you'd protect is usually smaller than the visibility you'd lose.

Is traditional SEO dead?

No. The inputs are broadly the same — relevance, clarity, technical health, reputation. What's changed is the shape of the results page and the fact that being the source of an answer now matters as much as being a blue link.

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Written by Adam, A9 Web Design

Adam builds hand-coded websites for small businesses across Cambridgeshire and looks after their hosting, SEO and advertising day to day. Everything here comes from work on real client sites — no theory, no filler.

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