So a client emailed me a screenshot last month and she was properly rattled. Somebody had searched the exact phrase her whole page was built on, Google had printed an answer right at the top of the results, and her page was underneath it like a spectator. Do I need to panic, she asked. And my answer, after thinking about it more than I probably should have, is no. But you should understand the shape of the thing.
An AI Overview, because that is what it is called, is the paragraph of text Google writes itself at the top of some searches. It reads the pages below, borrows from them, and stitches an answer. It has been spreading across UK searches for a couple of years now, starting with the obvious question-shaped stuff. Your page does not get replaced. The list is still there underneath, and Google still cites the pages it nicked from. The overview is a lid on the list. People say it “replaced the ten blue links” and that is just not true.
Where it stings, though, is that the lid occupies the space where your page used to get first-glance attention, and if the lid is open and readable, some people close the tab with the answer sitting in their head. Fine for them. They got what they came for.
Now the bit that actually matters for whether you should care. Search “why does my boiler keep losing pressure” and a written answer genuinely is what you wanted, so the overview is doing the job and clicking through to some random plumbing blog felt like extra errands. Your explaining content is getting cannibalised. It is, that happens, and there is no point getting sentimental about blog traffic that never went anywhere anyway.
But search “emergency plumber Ascot” and what does an overview even say about that? Nobody on a wet Tuesday wants a short essay about the notion of urgency. They want a name, a phone number, and the sign of a living person. Google knows this, so those local, bookable searches have barely moved at all, and they are the searches that pay your bills. The maps panel did not vanish. If your business lives on transactions, nothing has come down on your head, and I suspect most owners reading scary headlines about AI search are living that exact situation without checking.
The uncomfortable case is the business that built its site backwards, which is common. Home page one paragraph, twenty blog posts answering what is and how to, and the service pages are thin. All the traffic sits in the part Google now swallows, and all the money pages rank nowhere either way. That problem existed long before the overviews, they just made half of it show up.
What I actually did with that client, for the record. Looked at her service page first, and it had about forty words on it, so we rewrote it to say what she does, where, roughly what it costs, and how to book, plain sentences, no marketing voice. Then we left her blog alone, kept it, because it still earns her brand searches and the odd direct enquiry from people who had the answer served to them and then thought, alright, but who fixes it. Third thing we sorted was the Google Business Profile, which is the panel to the right that overviews make MORE valuable, not less, because when the top answer is vague, the specific one underneath stands out.
None of this is clever and there is nothing secret in it. The trick, if it deserves the word, is being the specific option rather than competing to be the generic one. Generic is exactly what machines produce now, and for free, so generic is a bad place to own property.
If you want to know which half of your own traffic is exposed before you spend anything, we do this sort of looking for small businesses around Berkshire, and it genuinely only takes an afternoon. Talk to us. And if you have never looked at where your enquiries come from in the first place, this plain-English guide is the natural next read.
