In this ongoing analysis, we examine the impact of Google’s increasingly rapid rollout of AI Overviews and now AI Mode, as well as what publishers can expect in the coming weeks and months as these changes solidify and consumer behavior evolves alongside them. This post will evolve and be updated as we analyze additional data on the impacts of other AI features on publisher site traffic as it becomes available.
The Shifting Sands of Search – Google's AI Evolution and the Publisher Landscape
Google I/O 2025 marked a significant turning point in the evolution of search, with the widespread rollout of AI Overviews and the introduction of AI Mode, providing key indicators of what the SERP (search engine results page) will look like, likely by the end of the year.
For publishers and news organizations that rely on organic search traffic for readership and revenue, these changes present profound challenges and opportunities. This evolution will force publishers to reconsider their strategies for audience growth in 2025 and beyond. We are already seeing these shifts in the data we encounter daily, and we will share some of that information here. More importantly, we aim to ensure that you are informed so that you can adjust your audience growth strategies accordingly.
Understanding the AI Overviews, AI Mode, and the Future of Search
What are AI Overviews and AI Mode?
AI Overviews:
Since their debut in 2024, AI Overviews have become increasingly familiar on search engine result pages. But, what exactly is an AI Overview?
Instead of providing a list of links, like traditional search, Google will now try to answer a user's query by harnessing the capabilities of its own LLM, Gemini. The AI will populate a paragraph or two at the top of the SERP by referencing multiple pieces of content, creating an AI Overview.
AI Mode:
This is where Google really leans into AI. Unlike AI Overviews, AI Mode doesn’t reside on the traditional search engine result page. This feature is found on a new tab/filter in Google (the same location where a user would look for “Images” or “News”.
Google illustrates AI Mode with the following language:
"AI Mode is Google’s most powerful AI search experience. You can ask anything and get an AI-powered response, with the ability to go deeper through follow-up questions and helpful links to the web. AI Mode expands the capabilities of AI Overviews with more advanced reasoning and interaction methods. It divides your question into subtopics and searches for each one simultaneously. This way, AI Mode can explore the web to find even more relevant content that matches your question.”
Think of AI Mode like chatting with a virtual assistant. Here is a video that offers more about this AI feature. Go ahead and experience AI Mode for yourself.
What's changed in 2025?
The expansion of AI Overviews occurred gradually through late 2024 and into the first quarter of 2025. SEMRush data shows the percentage of searches triggering AI Overviews roughly doubled from ~7% in January 2025 to 13% by March 2025. Then, following updates in Google’s documentation and I/O announcements, that volume accelerated to nearly half of searches containing an AI Overview answer by the end of May 2025. That means, U.S. search users are about as likely to receive an AI-generated answer box for informational searches as they are not to receive one.
What can we see in the data?
Starting in late April, we began to observe a divergence between impressions and clicks for even the most well-optimized websites in search. This occurs when content is highly visible in search results, yet people are not clicking on it. Previously, this may have indicated opportunities to optimize and enhance headlines to attract more clicks. However, today we understand that this is happening due to the rapid rollout of AI Overviews. The link to your site is visible, but people are not clicking because the answer has already been summarized for them. See this trend for yourself in some of the Google Search Console screenshots below.
🔑 Impressions are purple. Clicks are blue. CTR is green.
National news brand and website:
Regional/statewide news and lifestyle website:
City/regional lifestyle website:
Additionally, we see a rapid increase in keywords with an AI Overview present across numerous publisher websites.
🔑 Number of keywords with an AI Overview present is represented in green.
City/regional lifestyle and news website:
National lifestyle and fashion website:
Statewide lifestyle and news website:
While we've expected impacts from AI Overviews for some time, the pace of these changes is rapid and undeniable.
Emerging Search Platforms & Shifting Consumer Behavior
Although Google remains the incumbent gatekeeper, a new group of AI-powered “answer engines” is quickly carving out market share and reshaping where and how audiences initiate their searches.
AI-powered “answer engines” are growing in popularity
While Google still commands roughly 30x more search volume than all AI competitors combined, traffic to these new tools is compounding monthly. Visits to ChatGPT grew by 7% between April 2025 and May 2025 alone. AI-powered search engines together still only account for <5 % of Google’s domestic traffic, but their trajectories suggest that share will keep expanding.
ChatGPT’s U.S. web traffic, estimated to be about 900 million visits per month, already places it in the general vicinity of web traffic to LinkedIn and X. Perplexity and Claude are still orders of magnitude smaller but growing fast enough to merit a watch.
Early signs of consumer behavior changes
Since AI Overviews began appearing on roughly half of U.S. queries in May 2025, the classic path for a search visitor is fracturing. As a result, many publishers are seeing impressions in Search Console climb even as clicks flatline or drop, a gap that widens in step with AI Overview coverage, as shown in the charts above. Layer on the fast-growing traffic to ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude, each of which embeds citations that can drive website visits, and it’s clear that searcher loyalty is no longer a given but a moving target. So what should a publisher do? That's next.
What This Means for Publishers
This period, which feels like an AI arms race alongside rapidly shifting consumer behavior, will represent a tremendous amount of change for publishers. Traffic sources once considered reliable are fracturing, and publishers will have to adjust their strategies and expectations for growth.
Accept Change and Optimize Accordingly
Earn a place inside the answer
As traditional blue links continue to be pushed down the SERP, optimizing for visibility and optimizing for AI Overviews are quickly becoming the same. While there's no surefire method to guarantee you're cited as a featured source within an AI Overview, there are steps publishers can take to enhance their chances of appearing in these snippets.
First and foremost, SEO is the backbone of AEO (answer engine optimization). AEO is responsible for ranking content within AI Overviews. What does this mean? In a nutshell, SEO efforts haven't been in vain; they are a large part of what it takes to rank in these placements.
Secondly, begin to structure content in a way that's easily understood – for both machines and people. A straightforward first step in achieving this is to combat "walls of text." Long-form content can be challenging for both parties to digest. Lean into the idea of chunking content out beneath headers, creating listicles, and including visuals like charts, tables, and infographics.
Third, claim your corner. Quora and Reddit are among the most cited sources in AI Overviews. Establish your brand's presence on these platforms, create engaging content, and contribute to the conversation. This will enhance your website's chances of being cited in AI Overview placements.
Finally, stay informed. The digital landscape is always evolving, and knowledge is power. Keep an eye on shifts in SERPs and upcoming changes to stay ahead of the curve.
Review and reconsider your robots.txt
Last year, we published a blog to help publishers understand the purposes of the various user agents crawling their websites on behalf of multiple large language models (LLMs) and AI tools. With these changes in mind, it's worth auditing your robots.txt file to ensure it is up to date. Review the recently updated post and confirm that your robots.txt file reflects your current goals regarding the accessibility of your content to search and answer engines across the web.
Invest in trust signals
Signaling trust and authority from every page of your website is increasingly important in the world of SEO and AEO. Search and answer engines audit far more than the article itself in search of trust signals from your website. They look for credibility signals across your entire domain. At a minimum, every serious publisher should maintain a crystal-clear About/Company page that explains ownership, mission, and funding; a public-facing Editorial Standards or Ethics page that spells out fact-checking, corrections, and sourcing policies; and detailed Author pages that highlight each writer’s expertise, affiliations, and social proof. Add a Corrections log (even if corrections are rarely issued) and a prominent Contact/News Tips page so humans and crawlers can see you’re accountable.
Mark up all of these essential pages on your website with Organization, Person, and WebPage schema to reinforce identity, and link them in your website footer so they’re just one click away from every article. Together, this constellation of pages functions like a digital masthead: it satisfies Google’s E-E-A-T framework, gives AI Overviews factual snippets to quote, and—most importantly—reassures readers that a real human, not a fly-by-night scraper, stands behind the content.
Stay curious
This volume of change is enough to leave anyone feeling overwhelmed. Our advice and tactic is to stay curious and informed. We'll keep this post up to date as we learn and absorb more, and we hope that you'll stay on this ride with us.