The significant changes and innovation of new AI technologies have been impacting our daily user experience tremendously. We can see a major change in our digital world.
The recent addition of Google AI Overview undoubtedly influenced us in various ways.
This new feature was launched in mid-May in the US and has expanded to six more countries till now. This AI tool promises brief and instructive synopses of complex topics on Google search. Furthermore, it vows to take the legwork out of searching.
This aims to provide changes to both traditional ways of searching and improve traffic on the websites.
In brief-
This AI overview feature has surely delivered an easy way to search for information, but it has not significantly impacted website traffic. Big publishers like Ziff Davis and Dotdash claim that there is not much difference in their traffic.
Dotdash Meredith says:
“The impact on our traffic has been negligible. Based on our analysis, AI-generated answers are being served on roughly 15% of searches across our categories, with the highest frequency in Health, Technology, and Finance.”
Whereas Ziff Davis says:
“We analyzed thousands of queries across our key domains that generate the lion’s share of our organic search referrals and the percentage of times that an AI Overview appeared. It fell to 8%, meaning that 92% of the time the search engine results page did not include an AI Overview for the queries that mattered most to us.
At this point, we don’t see it as a significant change to the search experience.”
It is good news that we got an insight into how the AI overview has been functioning so far. As of now, we can state that these two reports have been very insightful.
Let’s hope to see a breakthrough, as Generative AI is still developing and has just started reshaping the search.
