AI Overviews killed the snippet, not search
Why the doom-take on AI Overviews is wrong, and what actually changed for organic traffic.
The first six months of AI Overviews in production told a clear story: featured-snippet traffic collapsed, and brand-search traffic stayed roughly flat. The press narrative — 'AI killed organic search' — confuses these.
What actually died: zero-click queries on informational intent. What survived: commercial intent, branded intent, and any query where the user has to act on a specific URL. AI Overviews summarise; they don't transact.
The strategic move is to reweight content investment toward commercial intent and away from purely informational queries. We've been doing this on every client portfolio since Q3 2024. The clients who reweighted are flat-to-up on revenue from organic; the clients who didn't are down.
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