When Google’s AI Overviews arrived in May 2024, search engine strategists—the specialists who make a living by getting web pages to the top of people’s query results—took notice.
With the implementation of Overviews, Google’s first page search results, a target destination for anyone creating and optimizing content, suddenly sat below a response generated by Gemini, the company’s AI engine.
“Our initial reaction was, ‘Well, how is it going to work in the future? What kind of query is it going to take in, and how do we adjust to that?’” Tavish Harrison, a freelance SEO strategist, told IT Brew. “And I’m pretty sure every SEO on the planet was trying to adjust then, to figure out what it was doing exactly.”
First, is SEO…IT? Sarah McNaughton, founder of content-strategy consultancy McNaughton Digital Media, sees SEO as the “middleman” between the content team and engineering teams. While an SEO strategist might find relevant keywords and phrases to place within a story, much of the practitioner’s work is technical and unseen by a reader.
A site and its content, for example, needs to be indexable and contain the right “schema” or classifying metadata that a crawler can find and process for its output. Google also processes JavaScript applications, so an IT pro and an SEO pro may have to coordinate to ensure that apps are functioning properly.
SEO no. With AI Overviews taking a bite from search results, the SEO strategist role might appear to be in trouble. Following staff cuts of around 21%, Business Insider CEO Barbara Peng told Axios in June that the company would pull back on areas sensitive to search traffic, like its SEO and Google-driven commerce business. The same month, the Wall Street Journal reported a decline in news sites’ organic traffic (i.e., the number of visitors who arrive at a site via unpaid search results).
Meanwhile, AI is racking up pageviews. From August 2024 to July 2025, the market of over 10,500 AI tools recorded “nearly 100 billion estimated web visits,” according to a study from SEO-growth firm OneLittleWeb. The top 10 chatbots, led by ChatGPT, experienced a 123.35% year over year increase in web traffic, adding over 30.9 billion new visits.
But Noam Dorros, a director analyst at Gartner, said today’s SEO strategist should be excited about being in the field. It’s AI that’s allowing today’s SEO experts to play a more active business-leading role, informing strategy and helping people understand the evolutions of the search results, he said.
“It’s the shiny new toy out there,” Dorros told IT Brew. “AI is the elephant in everyone’s room, and they all want to know what to do. How do we measure it? And SEO specialists and people with SEO experience are the ones who can help and answer those questions.”
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Evolving strategies. Today’s SEO strategists are adapting their techniques beyond the earlier paradigm of researching keywords and placing them throughout a web page or article, in the hopes that a search crawler will place their website at the top of a results page. “We are long, long past the days of targeting a single keyword for one article. That’s been outdated practice for a long time,” McNaughton said.
McNaughton lately has advised almost all clients to build FAQ sections for content—a structure that hopefully aligns with a person’s long-winded queries to a chatbot.
“We don’t know for sure, but just based on my own personal usage and other people’s usage, I’d say that it’s a good guess that people are going to be a little more verbose in their searches on [large language models] than they are on Google,” McNaughton said.
With click rates decreasing, Josh Petit, SEO manager for Monster, sees SEO undergoing a radical change in success metrics. These days, he considers search engine strategy a “real-estate game”: a blitz to get citations into AI Overviews, Google’s “People Also Ask” function (which shows related questions), its set of accompanying Image Packs, or whatever arises next.
Impressions—or how many times your site is seen—is more important for his team than click-through rates these days, according to Petit: “It’s not necessarily all about just the clicks.” To give his team the best chance “to take up as much space as possible,” he recommends an article make a question its own header and answer it directly “to make it real easy for AI to pull that answer,” Petit told us.
People are trying to do whatever they can to ensure visibility, according to Dorros.
“The difficulty is, these engines are all black boxes, right? They’re not giving playbooks to anybody to say, ‘This is what exactly you should do to show up,’” he said, adding that the people who have seen changes and algorithm updates are the ones best equipped to translate the new developments to marketing leaders.
For now, SEO strategists are left to rely on their bank of tried-and-true tactics, such as assigning metadata schema or arranging some frequently asked questions, and their own cleverness. When it comes to AI Overviews or whatever capability comes next, strategists like Harrison want to know what a new feature is doing and what powers its decisions.
“Curiosity is the basis that we all work from,” he said. “SEO isn’t a foundational thing in the organization itself, right? Because it is shifting, and people need to know how that’s adjusting. And I think that’s exciting.”