Search Engine Optimization Services

What AI Overviews actually did to organic traffic

This is the part most agencies will not tell you plainly, so here it is with the research attached. Pew Research Center tracked 68,879 real Google searches and found that when an AI summary appeared, users clicked a traditional search result in 8% of visits. When no AI summary appeared, they clicked 15% of the time — almost twice as often. Only 1% clicked a link inside the AI summary itself.

Ahrefs measured the same effect from the ranking side. In April 2025 they found AI Overviews cut position-one click-through rate by 34.5% across 300,000 keywords. Re-running the study in May 2026, the drop had deepened to 58%. Position two lost about half its clicks. Even position ten lost around a fifth.

So if your rankings held steady over the last eighteen months and your traffic fell anyway, you are not imagining it and your SEO is not necessarily broken. The SERP changed underneath you.

The counterweight matters too: brands cited inside AI Overviews earn measurably more clicks than brands appearing only as blue links. The work has moved from occupying a position to becoming the answer — which, usefully, is largely the same work done properly.

AEO and GEO: what Google actually says, and what agencies are selling

A whole vocabulary has grown up around optimising for AI answers — Answer Engine Optimisation, Generative Engine Optimisation, LLM Optimisation — and a great deal of it is being sold as a separate, expensive service with proprietary techniques.

Google published direct guidance on this in May 2026 and it is worth quoting: "There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary." And specifically: "You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features." That rules out llms.txt, AI-specific schema and content "chunking for AI" — three things currently being sold hard.

There is real research behind some of it. The Princeton-led GEO paper presented at ACM KDD 2024 found that specific content changes — adding citations, quotations and statistics — could improve source visibility in generative engines by up to 40%. But the authors were explicit that effectiveness varies sharply by domain, and none of the effective techniques were secret. They amount to: cite your sources, include original data, answer the question directly, and make the answer easy to extract.

Our position is that AI visibility is earned by being genuinely worth quoting — original data, clear direct answers, consistent brand entity information across the web, third-party corroboration through digital PR, and content that is actually in the HTML rather than assembled by JavaScript after load. We track brand citations across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot as a reported metric. We do not sell you a file that Google has said it does not read.

Technical SEO: the part that is either right or expensive

Technical work does not usually win rankings on its own. It removes the reasons you cannot win. A site Google struggles to crawl, that ships its content through client-side JavaScript, that has four URLs for every product and no canonical strategy, is competing with one hand tied — and no amount of content will free it.

The Core Web Vitals thresholds are fixed and measurable, assessed at the 75th percentile of real user loads and reported separately for mobile and desktop: Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds, Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1. Note that INP replaced First Input Delay in 2024 — if an agency's proposal still lists FID as a Core Web Vital, that proposal was written from a template nobody has updated in two years.

• Crawl and index hygiene — log-file analysis, crawl budget, index bloat, parameter handling, faceted navigation, redirect chains and soft 404s
• Rendering — whether your content exists in the HTML or only after JavaScript runs, which matters more than ever now that AI answer engines are extracting from the page
• Site architecture — click depth, internal linking, and topic clusters that make the relationship between your pages legible
• Structured data that matches the visible text, using types Google still supports. FAQ and HowTo rich results were fully deprecated in May 2026, and seven further types were retired in June 2025 — keeping the markup does no harm, but expecting SERP real estate from it is out of date
• International and multi-region targeting with hreflang, which matters for anyone serving both India and the USA
• Migration protocol — URL mapping, 301s, metadata preservation and Search Console verification, because a redesign is the most common way a business loses its rankings overnight

E-E-A-T, and what it really means for your site

Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust is a framework from Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines, not a score in the algorithm. It is worth being honest about that, because a lot of SEO invoices contain line items for "improving E-E-A-T" as though it were a dial.

What the framework describes is real, though. Google's own guidance says Trust is the most important of the four and the others exist to support it. For YMYL topics — health, finance, safety, legal — the bar is materially higher, and this is where most Indian agencies' template approach falls apart.

In practice the work is unglamorous: real author bios with real credentials, an About page that identifies actual humans, a Contact page with a verifiable address, citations to primary sources, original photography instead of stock, and clear disclosure of how content was produced. Google's position on AI-written content is about purpose rather than method — using automation to produce content primarily to manipulate rankings is a spam policy violation, while using it as a drafting tool for content that is genuinely useful is not.

Local SEO, and why it is a different discipline

For a clinic in Dwarka or a law firm in Auburn, the local pack is the entire game — three results above the organic listings, ranked on relevance, distance and prominence rather than on domain authority.

The work is Google Business Profile optimisation done properly: correct primary and secondary categories, complete attributes, service areas, products, posts, Q&A, and a steady flow of genuine reviews with responses. Then NAP consistency across every citation that mentions you, because conflicting addresses and phone numbers are the single most common reason a profile underperforms.

For multi-location businesses, the architecture matters more than any individual optimisation: one properly built location page per branch with unique content, embedded map, local schema and its own reviews — not thirty-eight near-identical pages with the city name swapped, which Google treats as doorway pages and has been demoting for years.

What we will not promise you

No agency can guarantee a number-one ranking, and anyone who does is either misleading you or planning to rank you for a term nobody searches. Google's own guidelines are explicit that no one has privileged access to rankings.

We also will not buy links. Paid links, private blog networks and link exchanges all violate Google's link spam policies, all work briefly, and all eventually cost more to clean up than they ever earned. The disavow and recovery work we do for new clients is almost always undoing something like this.

What we will commit to: a written technical baseline in the first thirty days, a keyword and content plan you can hold us to, monthly reporting against agreed targets, and an honest read on whether SEO is even the right channel for your situation. For some businesses it is not, and we would rather say so than take a retainer for twelve months of hope.