Now is the winter of our AI (dis)content – How Google’s AI Overviews Could Impact Your Search Visibility

Google’s AI Overviews are starting to reshape how people find information online — and for organisations with high informational content the changes are significant.

Whilst it is still summer outside many of the organisations we talk to are feeling a little chill from Google’s recent launch of AI Mode and AI Overviews. For charities and membership bodies, this shift has big implications for how people find, access and interact with your content online.

Currently, there are two questions that we are getting asked a lot – how is this going to impact us and how can we respond?

The honest answer is that everyone is still figuring this out and that no two organisations are quite the same, so there’s no standard answer. However, there are some things everyone can do to start understanding what’s changing.

How is this going to impact us?

This is a change that is fundamentally different to the occasional frustrations caused by algorithm changes – it is the first major leap for many of your users into a new way of engaging with content.

We don’t yet know how fundamental the shift will be, or how it will develop – but the trend is already significant, with some organisations we work with seeing traffic drops up to 30% on informational content.

Research indicates that informational queries – which are of huge importance to the not for profit sector – are the ones most impacted – SEMRush found that 88.1% of queries that trigger an AI overview are informational. Areas such as science, health and people and society are particularly impacted.

What’s less clear is the quality of the traffic being lost and some evidence suggests it may be lower intent.

A good way to understand how it might impact you is to look at what is already happening. What search terms are showing a decline? Can you see patterns to the shifts in organic search traffic? Are there any patterns to the type of queries that appear to be impacted?

How can we respond?

Time, tide and search engines wait for no-one, this shift is impacting the people you want to engage with right now so the main way to respond is to carve out time to start thinking about the problem.

Once you know how AI is currently impacting, you can start to think through how you want to respond by working through some questions:

• If you envisage this trend growing, how significant is this to you? Is the traffic and engagement that is at risk high-value – are these users likely to convert or return?
• What can be done to counter any traffic loss? Should you review other avenues to acquire those users you are now less able to reach on Google?
• When you do acquire users, what work do you need to do to ensure you can retain them over the long-term? If casting your hook gets harder, then holding onto each catch becomes even more important.
• What can you do that adds value that AI can’t? How can you create content that goes beyond what a GPT can generate to meet your users’ needs? Utilising your community, can you create human-led content that can’t be automatically generated?
• Is your approach to content and engagement fit for purpose in this new world? You need to deliver great editorial to engage and not just publish what your organisation does. Do you have the skills, the processes and the buy in you need to make that happen? If not, how can you get there?
• Can AI be a part of the answer to this problem? The recent Charity Digital Skills Report said 36% of charities are using AIs for content generation. How can your organisation use it to effectively and safely help your content producers drive engagement?

What can a good plan look like? It’s probably going to take a roadmap of change for most organisations to effectively deal with the problem. As time is always tight, you can sstart small and focus on finding actions that make a difference and which you can learn from.

• Review and rewrite high-performing content
• Pilot alternative discovery channels (e.g. YouTube and Instagram)
• Test AI tools for drafting content and internal workflows

If you are starting to explore this and want to talk through initial thoughts or find out how we can help, you can email me at ali@wearemc2.co.uk.