AI Overview
An AI Overview is the AI-written answer Google places at the top of the results page, above the normal links.
They launched in Australia on 29 October 2024, so they've been part of how Australians search for nearly 2 years.
Google assembles the answer from several sources and cites a handful of them with links.
The measurable effect is on clicks rather than rankings: Ahrefs tracked 963 domains through the French rollout in July 2026 and found the heavily exposed ones lost about 24.8% of their click-through rate within 9 days, while their rankings and impressions held steady.
That pattern is the thing to understand, because a site can look unchanged in every ranking report while receiving meaningfully fewer visits.
Exposure isn't even: questions a single paragraph can answer are absorbed most, and health topics were the worst hit in the French data at a 22.2% trigger rate.
Searches that need a price, a booking, a local availability or a human opinion hold up considerably better.
What this means for you
For a service business this is mostly survivable, because the searches that lead to a quote are the ones AI Overviews are worst at replacing. For informational blog traffic it's a real and permanent reduction.
This one sits under AI search.
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