But what if it could be easier?
The above is a question that (hopefully) every business aims to answer.
Certainly, the vast majority of inventions and new products have been created to make something easier.
When the internet was born, it gave us access to more information all at once than ever before. That was fun, but also overwhelming.
So search engines like Yahoo! and Google came along to help us sort through all that information so we could quickly and easily find what we were looking for without having to look through a digital version of the phonebook listing every website ever created.
Google dominated the online search market by continuing to ask the question: How can we make it easier for our users to find the information they’re looking for?
Fast forward a few decades, and of the ways in which Google sought to make looking for information easier for their users was to offer zero-click answers, even before ChatGPT was released.
If you’re not familiar with it, a zero-click answer is when you put a question into Google’s search bar and it gives you the answer directly on Google, alongside a list of links to click through to get your answer. That way, users could get their answer without having to click through to a website.
Good for users. Bad for the owners and managers of all the websites who worked so hard to create content to answer their audience’s questions as a way to lure prospects to their website.
The thing is: Google doesn’t exist to make us (the marketers and business owners) happy. It exists to make its users happy. Our job is to adjust our practices accordingly.
I talked to a lot of marketers at the time about the rise of zero-click answers, and most of them basically ignored the invention and rise of zero-click search results, except to focus more on creating long, in-depth content. The kind of content people will click from Google to read through because they want more than a quick answer to a short question.
But now we have Google’s AI Overviews and SearchGPT. Now people can get longer answers to more complicated questions without clicking through to the website(s) that contain that information.
Now what do we do?
There is no one right answer to this question because this technology is changing very quickly, and while we can all make guesses as to what’s going to happen next, no one knows for sure.
With that caveat in mind, let’s take a look at what we know so far about this brave, new world of AI in search and what we as marketers and business owners can do about it.
Table of Contents
- AI summaries
- Interactive Content
- The Riches Are in the Niches
- Share Yourself
- SEMrush’s Report on AI Overviews
- Now What?
AI Summaries
While Google’s AI Overviews have become known for summarizing a lot of content, that isn’t the only AI that’s summarizing content humans created.
AI has not yet reached the point of being able to create anything new. All “generative” AI does is scrape existing content and repurpose it into whatever it thinks we want.
Essentially, AI is really good at summarizing content created by humans. That means, if we want AI to mention our brand (which we do if AI is truly the future of online search,) we need to create content that makes it easy for AI to summarize.
The good news is that involves doing a lot of the same things that make Google happy: using lists and subheadings to break up long-form content to make it easy for the robots to understand what the content is all about. So, if you’re already doing that to make Google happy, keep doing it to make the robots happy as they take over the world.
Interactive Content
In March 2025, Google announced an additional feature to their AI Overview, called AI Mode: an interactive search capability that enables users to ask questions about the content AI regurgitates for them.
That means we need to create content that’s conducive to that Q&A style.
What would that look like?
It means FAQ-style content will continue to perform well. You should already be creating content that answers the questions you hear from prospects and clients again and again. All you have to do to make the robots happy is include the question before your answer to make it easy for the robots to find your answers to those questions and regurgitate them for its users — hopefully while mentioning your brand.
This also bodes well for interviews. If you have a podcast or another medium where you like to interview experts in your field (or a related field) transcribing that content and putting it up on your website as an article or blog post can boost your AI search rankings.
The Riches Are in the Niches
Content that is local and/or specific to a niche and targeted to a specific audience is hard for AI-repurposed content to compete with because there isn’t a lot of content out there the bots can scrape and repurpose for its audience. As a result, leveraging your unique experience to talk about what’s going on in your industry remains a top strategy for visibility and authority.
Having your own data to share and discuss is also a winning strategy. That’s why companies like Orbit Media, SEMrush, and Content Marketing Institute always rank at the top of searches for their industry: they’re creating their own data by surveying their audience and conducting their own tests around things like the types of content that rank well in searches. They then share and discuss the results of those studies, which makes their content completely unique while maintaining value and relevance.
Share Yourself
If you’re afraid of getting replaced by robots, the solution for that is easy: be yourself.
Yes, knowledge is power. And while robots can share information, they don’t have personal experience. They don’t have personality. And they certainly don’t have thought leadership.
It hasn’t been enough for a while now to share information by itself, but that’s more true than ever now as marketers are desperate for ways to stand out in a world of generic, AI-repurposed content.
The solution is, not just to share information, but to share how you reached that conclusion.
For every tip out there, you can find someone else providing an equal and opposite tip.
Give your audience a reason for your tip. What have you personally seen/experienced that has led you to that conclusion? Robots don’t have personal experience to share, and that’s why they’ll never be thought leaders.
SEMrush’s Report on AI Overviews
SEMrush conducted a study involving thousands of searches to see how often and which types of searches prompt Google’s AI Overviews.
You can read their full report here, but I wanted to go over some of their results — and what it means for marketers — below:
Prominence of AI Overviews
The vast majority of searches still don’t trigger an AI Overview, but the share of searches that do trigger an AI Overview is growing fast.
Zero-Click Searches
Google’s AI Overviews can increase zero-click searches, but that’s not always the case.
While we tend to view Google’s AI Overviews as the next iteration of zero-click searches (at least I have been), I do think the fact that AI Overviews come with a list of links as sources is significant. If people want more information — or just want to verify the information in the AI overview — they can do so by clicking on one of the links listed as a resource.
This suggests that, while being used by Google’s AI Overview might not be something to strive for, it’s not necessarily something to fear either … depending on the type of search.
That said, most AI Overviews do end up being zero-click searches, so just keep that in mind when deciding whether you want your brand included in an AI Overview.
Rethink Your Funnel
In the past, the secret to SEO success was to create content for prospects at the top of the funnel: the awareness stage. These are your how-tos and what-is topics for people who are just learning about the industry.
This means investing in the long game, especially if you tend to have a long buyer journey before prospects are ready to work with you. But it could pay off if you understood how to engage those prospects and lead them through the buyer journey until they’re ready to become clients. By grabbing them when they’re in the discovery phase, you could position yourself as their go-to source of information on this topic. With that going for you, you don’t need to convince them you’re the one to work with because their content will have done that for you.
But now AI is taking over the lion’s share of top-of-the-funnel keywords, which is going to make it harder attract leads to your website when they’re in the early stages of the buyer journey.
As a result, I recommend focusing most of your content on the middle and bottom of your funnel.
That said, an increasing share of mid- and bottom-of-the-funnel keywords are also seeing more AI Overviews in their search results, which suggests AI search results are coming for those searches as well. Even navigational keywords, while still just a tiny share of AI search results, have seen an increase in AI search results, which means even branded searches are at risk.
While it might sound scary that even branded keywords are no longer safe, first of all, keep in mind this is a tiny percentage of all searches.
Second, navigational searches are searches people conduct when they’re looking for a particular website, which means they’re still going to click through to the website if it shows up in an AI Overview.
In fact, the rise of navigational searches triggering AI Overviews might help explain why AI Overviews don’t always result in zero-click searches.
What I do find interesting is the fact that AI Overviews are currently focused primarily on keywords with a CPC below $2 and an informational search intent. I wonder if that’s because Google doesn’t want to direct searchers away from their ads, especially since Google only gets paid when someone clicks on an ad. This means there’s still an opportunity to rank for keywords with a CPC above $2 and a Difficulty ranking below 30%.
Now What?
Whether people use SearchGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, or another form of AI to get answers to their questions, the fact remains that they are using (and will continue to use) AI to look for information.
But it’s also true that they’ll want to dive deeper into a topic — and certainly into a brand — before making a purchasing/hiring decision.
That does make content irrelevant, but it does change how we should be thinking about our content strategy.
- While bottom-of-the-funnel content shouldn’t make up the majority of your marketing content these days, I would advise against ignoring it entirely. Continue to create content for the bottom of the funnel, if only so AI will mention your brand in those searches and you can gain some brand recognition before people get to the later stages of the buyer journey.
- Just don’t make the bottom-of-the-funnel content the focus of your content marketing strategy. Touch base on it every now and then, but focus most of your efforts on creating content for people who are in the research, consideration, and comparison stages of the buyer journey.
- Focus on creating Q&A-type content.
- Niche down.
- Share, not only your personality, but your personal experiences and why you take a particular stance on a given topic, because that’s the key to thought leadership. And thought leadership will never be replaced by a robot.
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