Is search engine optimisation Lifeless? Actual Knowledge vs. Web Hysteria

When we last checked, AI Overviews appeared in 16% of all US searches (more than doubled since March 2025).

AI Overviews (AIOs) have broken the old pattern where more impressions usually meant more clicks. Now, it’s common to see impressions go up while clicks go down at the same time—the great decoupling. This shift shows up in what’s often called “crocodile charts” (example below) in Google Search Console, where the lines for impressions and clicks move in opposite directions.

The impact of AIOs on websites is massive:

Google used to be a librarian who pointed you toward the right book. Now it’s become the librarian who just tells you the answer directly, so you never need to pick up the book.

That competitive edge you built over the years with content? It’s gone almost overnight.

Your competitor who never wrote a blog post can now pump out 50 AI-generated articles per week with an n8n automation bought for pennies online.

And here’s the kicker—they can still rank for your keywords. When we analyzed the top 20 ranking pages of 100k keywords with our AI content detector, we found that only 13.5% of the content was pure human.

Whereas everybody’s targeted on what’s altering, it’s simple to overlook what’s staying the identical. Google nonetheless processes billions of searches every day, the variety of guests who click on by is greater than ever, and AI assistants are dependent on the net content material that search engine optimisation helps create and optimize.

Regardless of all of the AI hype, Google isn’t going wherever.

What’s more, fewer people bounce when coming from AI assistants compared to organic search.

So, it seems that AI users generally fall into two groups:

1. Quick answer seekers get their needs met. These folks just want a fast, simple answer. If AI gives them what they need right away, they’re satisfied and move on—no need to click through. This kind of traffic probably wouldn’t have converted anyway.
2. Deep research users click through. The people who do click after seeing an AI summary need more than a basic answer. They want detailed guidance, want to try a tool, or are ready to take action. They’ve seen the overview and decided they need the full experience.

AI doesn’t create unique info; it finds and repackages present content material, a lot of which comes from Google search outcomes. Nearly all AI assistants use RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Era) to seek out info past what they already know from the information they have been educated on.

Which means rating excessive in Google, Bing, or Courageous search straight will increase your possibilities of being featured in AI outcomes.

Once more, it’s all within the information:

Conventional search engine optimisation turns into much more precious as a result of it now feeds two programs: direct search site visitors and AI citations.

Another SEO technique, content refreshing, still works as well. To illustrate, when my colleague Louise refreshed old content using Ahrefs AI Content Helper, the traffic boost was immediate and sustained. Here’s how she did it:

Finally, it still makes sense to publish new content because it can still outperform your greatest hits. For instance, our recent study on how AI Overviews reduce clicks generated more traffic in the last 3 months than our keyword research guide, and that guide has been our top performer for years, as you can see above.

In a nutshell, listed below are the important thing modifications it’s best to contemplate:

• As an alternative of gaming algorithms, construct real authority.
• As an alternative of optimizing for one search engine, optimize for a whole discovery ecosystem.
• As an alternative of making content material simply to rank, create content material so precious that AI programs cite you because the professional supply.

I’ll break down the small print beneath.

Much less site visitors doesn’t imply no site visitors. Even if you happen to’re getting 30% fewer clicks, that’s nonetheless doubtlessly hundreds of certified guests per thirty days. It’s foolish to desert one of the best acquisition channel most corporations can entry simply because it’s not as simple because it used to be.

Alter your expectations, refine your technique, however don’t throw away years of search engine optimisation funding as a result of the sport received tougher.

As you can see below, the brand that searchers will come across the most in this case is Clickup. AIOs will recommend this brand in 60% of cases, which creates a massive advantage over the competition and a high probability that searchers will land on their website in some way, be it through a link, searching the brand name in Google, or visiting the URL directly.

In 2025, brand building and SEO are inseparable. The companies that are winning are those that build brand authority while optimizing for search, creating a flywheel where each brand mention improves search rankings, and each search ranking builds more brand awareness.

We’ve documented exactly how to do this—from identifying the right brand building opportunities to measuring your progress with specific metrics. See the complete Brand SEO strategy.

Deep expertise in your niche gives you more visibility in AI overviews and search results, which still heavily influence consumer decisions.

To earn lasting visibility – and not short-term visibility bought by hacky LLM visibility tricks – your brand needs to signal to search engines and LLMs that it’s an authority in topics related to your offerings for the intended audience you serve.

Simply put, it’s about increasing the likelihood that your target audience sees your brand whenever they search for topics related to your product.

For example, Ahrefs focuses on topics like SEO, content marketing, and competitive intelligence because that’s what our audience cares about. By going deep on these topics—creating detailed guides, original research, and comprehensive resources—we’ve become the brand that AI systems cite when people ask SEO questions.

And, as you can see on this screenshot from our Web Analytics, it works: AI assistants cite our content. Without these pages, our brand would be absent from the AI results.

Bottom line: Don’t spread yourself thin across dozens of topics. Pick 5-10 closely related areas where your audience needs help, then become THE definitive resource on each one. When AI needs an expert source to cite, you want to be the obvious choice.

If AI can answer the search query in seconds, why would anyone click through to your site? Go deeper:

• Free tools: Create calculators, templates, or interactive resources. We found that “free tools” keywords didn’t experience the same CTR decline as other content, even when AI Overviews were present. Zero-click summaries weren’t enough; users had a job to do and needed the actual tool.
• Original data: Conduct surveys, analyze trends, and publish research that doesn’t exist anywhere else. Deep content that showcases unique experiences, expertise, and data naturally earns more backlinks—something essential for ranking in competitive spaces.
• Comprehensive guides: Be the definitive resource on your topic—the place people bookmark and return to.

Create content so valuable that AI summaries feel like previews, not complete answers. When someone needs to actually do something or get detailed guidance, they’ll still need to click through to your site.