Over the last few weeks, we have had numerous clients asking me about changes on Google that are occurring and have occurred over the last year.  Changes instigated by AI.

Changes that see clients’ websites ranking on Google be the same or even improved, yet see click-through rates decrease.

AI is in the grips of changing our lives and the way we operate day to day, and the way we work.  Now I am not going to go off on a tangent and write how AI is taking over the world, and the Turning Test needs applying.   But the rise of AI in this decade has instigated the changes at Google, as I write in May 2025.

The last 12 months have seen a number of changes to how we search online and via Google.   I have spent hours online and face-to-face going through this with clients.  I have to say clients have not been too favourable to the changes, but as always with change, opportunities appear.   This is no different for a change in organic search.

Google AI Overviews

AI Overviews was launched in May 2024.   No doubt, everyone is familiar with Google AI Overviews now, but it effectively gives an AI-generated overview for certain queries. Initially, this was for complex queries.

This is part of Google’s much broader Search Generative Experience (or SGE for short), where, to improve the user experience on Google, the search engine gives a concise answer, which involves the user being able to use fewer clicks to get the answer.   Putting it another way, a user can get an answer without having to visit a website, a no-click experience.

Note fewer clicks or no clicks, that’s right, fewer clicks to get the answer.   Naturally, this has upset a lot of website owners who were or are ranking well on Google because they are suddenly getting less traffic to the website from Google, not because of a ranking drop, but because of Google AI Overview.

Not good if you’re a publisher or advertiser.

It means you can be number 1 of 1 on Google or number 2 or 3 for that matter for a certain term, you are going to get less traffic from Google as AI Overviews is well in truly taking up a lot of space on the screen for the user….see below on the term “What is SGE”

Quality Content in Core Algorithm Updates

This is nothing new, Google has always wanted the best content for its users.   In 2024, we saw many updates by Google on this area in March, August and November.   These focused on content quality and user experience.  March gave us the Helpful Content System as part of the core algorithm update.   A result of this was that low-quality and unoriginal content was hit by Google.   Many of the AI blogs that were raging through Google in 2022 suddenly disappeared from the Google ranking.

Search Engine Roundtable polled website owners around the world and estimated 44% of websites lost traffic and ranking in the updates last year. That is significant.

Better Spam Detection and Policy Enforcement

Remember 15 years ago when any type of backlink would help you in Google.   Those days are long gone and in fact if you were spam backlinking in the past, then you have probably been hit in 2024.   Google has never liked spam (who does) but now the spam detection is better than ever.

If you want to read more on how Google has hit spam sites feel free to read directly from Google, but to give you an overview….

• Site Reputation abuse: Websites have been targeted that have low-value content to exploit established reputations
• Scaled content abuse: This is targeting low-quality content, which is aimed at manipulating search rankings
• Expired domain abuse: Repurposing domains to host spammy or low-value and low-quality content

Basicically Google can find the crap quicker and more importantly stop it from ranking.   Google has always wanted the best content in the rankings.

Shift in User Search Behaviour

We are very much in speculative terrain here but as the year unfolds and as we enter 2026, we are going to know more and more. One thing we can be sure of, and perhaps this reflects your search behaviour, more users in the search market are using AI such as ChatGPT or Perplexity to get the information they want.

Apple is able to get users’ information from search now using their devices, and this has seen a Google search on Safari. Apart from electrifying the Google v Apple battles, it highlights the use of AI in search.   On May 8th, Eddy Cue at Apple testified at a US antitrust trial that Google search has decreased on Safari for the first time in 22 years.

We can only speculate at the moment what search will be like in 10 years’ time and how this will affect the traffic to your website.

What we do know is how the intro of AI is impacting websites by….

• Zero-click searches – As mentioned before, Google AI Overview is taking clicks away from websites, and it is certainly taking longer for a user to get to the traditional organic listings
• Reduced click-through rates – Click-through rates are down; many people and businesses across the world are losing users to their websites. You may be number 1 of 1 on the organic listing, but AI is hampering click-through rates. It is estimated that in the last year, website click-through rates are down by 35%….See here
• AI Platforms – Users can get answers more quickly and easily to certain queries on platforms such as ChatGPT 

When we take all this into consideration, the 33% drop is not on all terms of search organically and in the past, we have spoken about different types of search intent.

Google AI Overview, for example, is only prominent on informational type keywords, which affect blog pages or resource pages.

Transactional and branded searches are much less affected.

In all honesty, the changes being implemented by Google and AI platforms are going to bring immense opportunity for website owners to get traffic and more traffic to their websites.  It’s no longer Search Engine Optimisation but Website Optimisation, where we look to optimise on all platforms.

I am going to be providing you with some more blogs on this over the next few weeks, but since April 2025, even Google AI Overview is giving us an opportunity to rank via rich snippets.

We have begun moving to AI search optimization in 2024, and we will be going more so as the year progresses to keep our clients competitive on search.   There will be more developments this year.

Google on the 20th of May 2025, Google released Google AI Mode in the USA.   This will further increase the AI developments on Google to give users a conversational approach, and we will be returning to this in June.

We will be ready.