SEO after AI Overviews

For the last year, every SEO review has eventually circled to the same question: what do we do about answer engines and AI Overviews? The honest answer is: less than the vendors selling you the panic say, and more than the contrarians dismissing them say.

Here is what we have actually changed across three client rebuilds in the last six months.

1. Structured answers near the top of the page

Lead with the direct answer in plain prose, then expand. Not because of any new ranking factor, but because the same prose answers the question for an AI summariser and for a hurried human, and search traffic is increasingly both at the same time.

2. Citations the engine can reuse

Numbers, definitions, and claims that are obviously sourceable get treated as named entities. We give them an HTML structure (a blockquote with an cite, a definition list, a labelled callout) that an extractor can find without inference. It is not magic — it is the same accessibility work we should have been doing for ten years.

3. Stop chasing zero-click queries

Some queries will resolve inside the AI Overview and never click through. Optimise for the queries that lead somewhere — comparison, evaluation, configuration, pricing. That has always been true; AI just makes the trade-off more honest.

Net effect: traffic patterns shifted but conversion-weighted traffic held steady or grew. The doom narrative is, at least so far, overstated. The “do nothing” narrative is also wrong. The middle path is the boring one.