If you’ve been following digital marketing at all in the past year, you’ve probably seen some version of the headline: ‘SEO is dying.’ Organic traffic is down. Google’s AI Overviews are answering questions before users ever click on a website. Zero-click searches are at record highs. The old playbook is obsolete.
Some of that is true. Some of it is overstated. And a lot of the coverage focuses on the businesses most affected — large content publishers, media companies, educational platforms — rather than the local and regional service businesses that make up most of DVC’s client base.
The reality is more nuanced than either ‘SEO is fine’ or ‘SEO is over.’ This post is a clear-eyed look at what actually changed, what it means for different types of businesses, and what a smart SEO approach looks like in 2026.
What AI Overviews Actually Are — and What They Changed
Google launched AI Overviews broadly in May 2024. By early 2025, they were appearing at the top of search results for roughly 16% of all queries — a significant portion of the search landscape, concentrated heavily in informational searches.
The mechanic is straightforward: instead of showing a list of blue links, Google synthesizes an answer from multiple sources and presents it at the top of the page, before any organic results. Users can read the answer and get what they came for without clicking through to any website.
The impact on click-through rates has been significant. Research by Seer Interactive, which analyzed 25 million organic impressions across 42 organizations from June 2024 through September 2025, found that organic click-through rates for queries with AI Overviews dropped from 1.76% to 0.61% — a 61% decline. Paid search CTR on those same queries fell even harder, dropping 68%.
Zero-click behavior has accelerated alongside AI Overviews. Data from Similarweb and multiple industry analyses puts the zero-click rate — searches that end without any click to an external site — at roughly 58–65% of all Google queries by mid-2025. That’s up from 56% before AI Overviews became widespread, and it represents a real structural shift in how people interact with search results.
For businesses whose SEO strategy was built around informational content — blog posts, how-to guides, educational resources — this is a genuine challenge. Google is now answering many of those questions directly, and fewer users are clicking through to read the source material.
The businesses feeling the most pain from AI Overviews are the ones whose SEO strategy was built entirely on answering informational questions — content that Google can now summarize and deliver without a click.
Who’s Actually Getting Hurt — and Who Isn’t
Not all SEO is equally affected. Understanding which categories are taking the real hits makes it easier to assess what any specific business should actually be worried about.
The most affected: informational content publishers
Large content publishers, news sites, educational platforms, and recipe/lifestyle blogs have taken the hardest hits. These businesses built traffic models around ranking for informational queries — ‘how to,’ ‘what is,’ ‘best practices,’ ‘symptoms of’ — and AI Overviews are now answering those questions directly. HubSpot reported organic traffic drops in the 70–80% range on some content categories. Chegg, the education platform, reported a 49% decline in non-subscriber traffic tied directly to AI answering the study questions that used to drive traffic to their site.
These are real losses, and the businesses experiencing them are genuinely having to rethink their content and monetization strategies.
The most resilient: local and transactional searches
Service businesses — the contractors, healthcare practices, law firms, home services companies, and local retailers that make up most of the small business landscape — are in a meaningfully different position. Research from Ahrefs and Search Engine Land has found that AI Overviews appear for local search queries at dramatically lower rates than for informational queries. The reason is structural: AI can summarize a definition or explain a concept, but it can’t replace the function of a local search result. When someone searches ‘HVAC repair near me’ or ‘family law attorney Denver,’ they need to find an actual business and contact them. That action happens on a website, not inside a Google AI summary.
The data supports this. seoClarity’s analysis of over 432,000 keywords found that AI Overviews appear for essentially zero percent of local search queries — less than 0.01% as of late 2025. Transactional queries, where users are looking to take a specific action (book, buy, contact, schedule), are also significantly less affected than informational queries. Commercial intent searches have seen much more modest AI Overview growth compared to pure informational content.
For the typical local service business, the SEO landscape has changed less dramatically than the headlines suggest — though it has changed, and ignoring that is its own mistake.
What Has Actually Changed for Local and Service Businesses
Even for businesses relatively insulated from the AI Overview disruption, the rules of SEO are shifting in ways that matter. Here’s what’s genuinely different:
Authority and trust signals matter more than ever
Google’s AI systems draw heavily on signals of expertise and trustworthiness — what Google calls E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness). BrightEdge’s research found that 89% of sources cited in AI Overviews come from sites with strong authority signals. The threshold for ‘good enough’ SEO has risen. Thin content, weak backlink profiles, and minimal trust signals are increasingly insufficient for competitive visibility, regardless of whether AI Overviews are directly affecting your queries.
For local businesses, this translates into practical requirements: a well-maintained Google Business Profile, consistent NAP (name, address, phone) data across directories, genuine customer reviews, and content on your website that demonstrates real knowledge of your field — not generic filler.
Being cited in AI Overviews carries real value
While AI Overviews reduce clicks for most organic results, there’s a meaningful exception: Seer Interactive’s data found that brands cited as sources inside AI Overviews earn 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks than brands on the same queries that aren’t cited. Being mentioned in the AI summary signals to users that you’re an authoritative source — and they click through at higher rates as a result.
Getting cited in AI Overviews requires exactly the things good SEO has always required: authoritative content, strong E-E-A-T signals, structured data that helps Google understand your content, and clear, direct answers to the questions your audience is asking. The tactics have evolved, but the underlying logic hasn’t.
Rankings alone are no longer a complete measure of SEO success
One of the most significant strategic shifts is in how SEO performance should be measured. Ranking #1 for a query no longer guarantees meaningful traffic if an AI Overview is appearing above your result and absorbing the clicks. The metric that matters is whether visibility in search is actually driving traffic and leads — not just where you rank.
This means paying closer attention to click-through rate data alongside rank data, tracking which queries are triggering AI Overviews for your target terms, and evaluating SEO performance against business outcomes (leads, calls, form submissions) rather than ranking position alone.
Google Business Profile has become even more central
For local businesses, the Google Business Profile has always mattered for map pack visibility. In the AI search environment, it matters more. When Google’s AI surfaces local business information, it draws heavily from structured data sources like Google Business Profiles. Accurate, complete, and regularly updated profiles — with real photos, current hours, consistent categories, and a steady stream of genuine reviews — are foundational to appearing in AI-mediated local search results.
Local SEO fundamentals didn’t stop working. They became more important — because AI systems rely on the same structured signals that local SEO has always optimized for.
What Smart SEO Strategy Looks Like in 2026
The businesses that will navigate this environment well are the ones that treat SEO as a visibility and authority strategy, not just a traffic-generation tactic. Here’s what that means practically:
Build content that earns citation, not just rankings. Structure your content so it answers questions directly and clearly. Use proper headings, include the specific information people are searching for, and make sure your factual claims are supported and up to date. Content that’s well-organized and authoritative is the content Google’s AI systems choose to cite — which means it gets both the citation credit and the click premium that comes with it.
Maintain technical foundations rigorously. Page speed, mobile responsiveness, clean site architecture, and proper schema markup matter more now because they’re part of how AI systems evaluate and extract content from your site. A technically sound site is easier for both Google’s traditional crawlers and its AI systems to understand and reference.
Invest in your Google Business Profile as a primary asset. For local businesses, this isn’t optional anymore. Regular updates, active photo management, prompt responses to reviews, and accurate business information aren’t maintenance tasks — they’re core visibility infrastructure in the AI search environment.
Measure what moves the needle for your business. Impressions are going up for many businesses even as clicks decline — because Google is showing your brand in more AI-generated contexts. Traffic volume is less useful as a primary metric than lead volume, call volume, and conversion rate from organic sources. Track the outcomes SEO is driving, not just the rankings.
Don’t abandon SEO for the new shiny thing. SEO leads still convert at significantly higher rates than outbound leads — multiple studies put the multiple at 8x or higher. The value of organic search visibility is not gone. The nature of that visibility is evolving, but the businesses pulling back from SEO investment are giving ground to competitors who aren’t.
The Bottom Line
SEO changed meaningfully in 2025. The informational content play that drove traffic for a decade is under real pressure from AI Overviews. Zero-click search is a genuine trend that’s restructuring how some businesses need to think about organic traffic.
But for most local and service businesses — the HVAC contractor, the dental practice, the law firm, the home services company — the core of what SEO needs to deliver hasn’t changed: high visibility when the right person is searching for what you offer, in the geography where you operate, at the moment they’re ready to take action.
That job is still done by SEO. The tactics have evolved. The underlying mission hasn’t.
About Digital Visibility Concepts
DVC is a full-service digital marketing agency with 20 years of experience and over $100 million in managed ad spend. We work with businesses across the country to build marketing infrastructure that actually connects — from paid search and SEO to website development, AI tools, and integrated strategy.