How AI Overviews Are Changing SEO

Search has always been about relevance, but how it’s defined and delivered is changing fast. With Google’s introduction of AI Overviews (AIOs), search engines no longer just point users to links, they summarise answers directly on the results page.

For brands, that means visibility is no longer just about ranking; it’s also about being included in the overview content. If your content isn’t appearing in AI-generated summaries, you may be losing influence before users ever click.

That’s why optimising for AIOs has become an essential part of modern SEO. At DAC, we tackle this challenge through a layered strategy, building on foundational SEO principles and advancing into a structured testing framework purpose-built for the AIO landscape.

Nail the basics: traditional SEO is the foundation for AI success

Optimising for AI Overviews doesn’t start with AI, it starts with the fundamentals. Before your content can earn a place in an AI-generated summary, it must rest on a solid SEO foundation. AI systems still rely on clear structure, quality signals, and clean code to evaluate and extract meaningful answers.

If your content isn’t easy for search engines to understand, it won’t surface, no matter how relevant it may be.

Here are the core SEO tactics that support AI comprehension and visibility:

• High-Quality, Authoritative Content: Create original, well-researched content that offers depth and clarity. Avoid generic or repetitive copy.
• Structured Data Markup: Use Schema.org to tag key elements (e.g. FAQs, articles, products) so AI can interpret context and enable rich results.
• Semantic HTML and Clear Content Hierarchy: Use proper HTML tags like <h1>, <h2>, and <p> to define structure. Avoid styling-based layouts without semantic meaning.
• Clean URL and Site Structure: Ensure your URLs are logical and readable. Organise your site so crawlers (and users) can easily navigate.
• Topic Clustering and Internal Linking: Group related content and link strategically between pages to signal topical authority and depth.
• Crawlability and Indexability: Use robots.txt, canonical tags, and no index directives thoughtfully to ensure key pages are accessible to search engines.
• Page Experience and Performance: Prioritise fast load times, mobile optimisation, and Core Web Vitals. Reduce JavaScript where possible.
• Natural Language and Entity Optimisation: Write conversationally and include recognisable entities (brands, places, people) to help AI understand your topic.

These aren’t just SEO best practices, they’re the foundation AI depends on to extract, interpret, and trust your content.

DAC’s AIO optimisation testing framework

Once a strong SEO foundation is in place, the next step is to optimise specifically for AI Overviews. DAC’s approach is built around a structured framework that helps diagnose where and how content should evolve to appear in AI-generated summaries.

Our strategy is grounded in three pillars:

• Topical Preparation: Identify high-potential keywords where your content already ranks well but isn’t appearing in AI Overviews. These represent realistic, near-term opportunities to gain visibility with minimal lift.
• Data Aggregation: Collect and structure a broad set of data points, including AIO-generated content, search queries, competitor citations, and on-page formatting patterns. This helps to understand what information AI is surfacing and how it’s being structured.
• Similarity Analysis: Use embedding technology to assess how closely your content matches the meaning behind user queries and AIO summaries. A similarity threshold of 70% or more signals strong topical alignment and highlights where to focus optimisation.

Together, these pillars help teams close the gap between traditional search performance and AI Overview inclusion.

Translate testing into clear content opportunities

Once AIO testing highlights where your content falls short, the next step is to turn those findings into focused, actionable improvements. At this stage, it’s not just about ranking, it’s about enhancing informational value and structural clarity.

AI Overviews favour content that delivers clear, complete answers in a format that’s easy to extract. That means moving beyond keyword usage and focusing on how well your content addresses the user’s intent, both in meaning and in presentation.

Here’s how to apply the insights uncovered during AIO Optimisation Testing:

• Audit keyword gaps: Focus on pages that already rank well in traditional results but don’t yet appear in AI Overviews. These are often low-lift, high-return opportunities.
• Enrich page content: Expand coverage with in-depth explanations, definitions, and context that align with informational intent.
• Validate semantic coverage: Use embedding-based similarity to confirm that your content meaningfully addresses related subtopics AI is surfacing.
• Tighten on-page UX: Improve readability with short paragraphs, clear subheadings, and bullet summaries. This aligns your structure with AI’s preference for digestible content chunks.
• Iterate continuously: AIOs evolve. Reassess frequently to adjust content as new competitors enter and AI behaviour changes.

Treat every visibility gap as a signal, and every test as an opportunity to refine and strengthen your content.

Visibility is no longer just about rankings

These refinements lead directly into a broader truth: the metrics that define success in search are changing.

Search engines are no longer just linking to answers, they are the answer. With AI Overviews, Google is shifting from a discovery model to a direct response model, pulling content from across the web to deliver instant summaries at the top of the results page.

Visibility now means more than high rankings—it’s about being present in the content that powers AI responses.

Key SEO elements are being redefined:

• Clicks become visibility
• Web pages become content chunks
• Keywords become topics
• Backlinks become brand mentions

To adapt, SEO teams must focus on how AI systems interpret and reuse content. Clarity, structure, and semantic depth are now central to being selected, not just found.

Measuring success in the Age of AI

Success in an AIO-driven landscape requires new metrics that go beyond rankings and clicks.

Key indicators include:

• Answer Visibility: How often your content appears in AI-generated overviews for key queries.
• Citation Quality: Presence of structured elements (like FAQs or How-tos), clickable links, and clear formatting that AI can cite.
• Brand Mentions: References to your brand across the web, even without links, which contribute to how AI evaluates authority.

These signals help AI systems decide whether your content belongs in an answer, influencing users earlier in their journey, before they even click.

AI Overviews are reshaping how content is surfaced, understood, and trusted. Staying visible means evolving your SEO strategy to match how AI defines relevance, not just how users search.

The future of SEO isn’t about chasing rankings; it’s about being chosen.