If you have been watching your Google Search Console impressions stay flat while click-through rates quietly decline, you are not imagining things and you are not doing something wrong. What you are experiencing is the measurable effect of AI Overviews — Google’s AI-generated answer summaries that now appear at the top of a significant proportion of search results pages, answering the user’s question before they have clicked a single organic result.

The question is no longer whether AI Overviews affect organic traffic. They do, and the data is clear on this. The question is what you do about it — and the answer is more nuanced, and more actionable, than most of the panicked commentary on this topic suggests.

What AI Overviews Actually Are (and How They Work)

Google’s AI Overviews — formerly called Search Generative Experience (SGE) during the testing phase — are AI-generated summaries that appear in a dedicated panel above organic search results for qualifying queries. They are powered by Google’s Gemini models and draw from multiple sources across the web, which Google cites with inline links and a sources panel.

The key distinction that most coverage misses: AI Overviews do not appear for all queries. They are currently most prevalent for informational and how-to queries — the ‘what is’, ‘how to’, ‘explain’ type searches where a direct answer is the primary user need. They are less common for transactional queries (‘buy running shoes’), navigational queries (‘Facebook login’), and highly localised searches. They are almost completely absent for YMYL (Your Money Your Life) topics where Google’s quality standards require authoritative sourced content.

AI Overviews appear most aggressively on informational queries where a summary is the primary user need. Transactional, commercial, and navigational queries are far less affected — which means your conversion-driving content is safer than your awareness content.