Yes, but the job has changed. SEO is still the work that gets your business found and chosen from a search page. What AI Overviews have changed is how often a search turns into a click, so paying for rankings alone, and judging the work on traffic alone, no longer tells you whether the money is earning.
This is worth saying plainly, because the panic version of this story is wrong and the complacent version is wrong. Google has not stopped sending customers to businesses. But the old deal, where a good ranking reliably produced a predictable stream of visits, has weakened, and any SEO plan that has not adapted to that is already out of date.
When Google answers a question directly on the results page, fewer people click through to any website. In a Pew Research Center analysis of real browsing data from 900 US adults in March 2025, people who saw an AI summary clicked a traditional search result in 8% of visits, against 15% when no summary appeared. Only 1% clicked a link inside the AI summary itself, and 26% ended their browsing session altogether. 1 Around one search in five produced an AI summary, rising to 60% for searches phrased as questions.
The trend has continued since. A Seer Interactive study covering 25.1 million organic impressions between June 2024 and September 2025 found the organic click-through rate on informational queries with AI Overviews fell 61%, and even queries without an AI summary saw click rates fall 41%. People are clicking less, everywhere. 2
So if your website gets fewer visits than it did two years ago, that is not automatically your agency’s failure, and more of the same work will not automatically bring the visits back. It is a structural change in what a search result is, and Google’s conversational AI Mode pushes the same change further.
Because the businesses that appear inside these answers, and in the results around them, are still the ones getting chosen. The same Seer study found that brands cited inside an AI Overview earned 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks than brands not cited. 2 Visibility has not stopped mattering. It has moved into AI search.
Think about what an AI Overview is: Google’s own summary of the businesses, answers and pages it judges most worth repeating. Being named in AI answers, like being chosen for a featured snippet before it, is not a different discipline from SEO. It is the outcome of good SEO: a site that answers real customer questions clearly, a business with consistent details and genuine reviews, and content specific enough to be worth citing. The work that earns a mention in an AI answer is the same work that earns rankings, map visibility and trust. Stopping it does not save money; it hands the visibility to whoever keeps going.
There is also a more basic point. AI summaries appear most often on question searches, the early research stage. Searches with clear buying intent, a trade, a place, an urgent problem, still produce map results, ads and familiar listings, and the businesses that show up there are the ones with their foundations in order: a complete Google Business Profile, genuine reviews and pages that answer questions plainly. That is SEO.
Judge it on enquiries, not on traffic. Fewer visits with the same number of phone calls is a good outcome in 2026, because the visits you lose to AI summaries were largely researchers, not buyers. If your agency reports rankings and sessions but cannot talk about enquiries, where they come from and what they are worth, the reporting has not caught up with the change.
Expect the work itself to shift. Less churning out thin blog posts to catch clicks, more making your real pages answer real questions plainly: what you do, where you do it, what it costs, why you are credible. Some agencies now call the AI-answer part of this work answer engine optimisation. It is not a new service to be sold twice; it is the same work, measured differently. Sound technical foundations, including structured data, help both Google and the generative AI systems quoting you understand the page. That is what AI summaries quote, what buyers read before they call, and what our guide to getting recommended by AI tools covers in detail.
And expect honesty about timescales. Nobody can guarantee a place in an AI Overview, just as nobody could ever guarantee a ranking. What a good agency can do is make you the kind of result these systems choose, and show you evidence that you are being chosen.
If your SEO spend exists to produce a monthly report rather than enquiries, stop and rethink. If nobody can explain what the work is doing for your visibility in the answers customers actually see, ask harder questions before renewing. And if your website cannot turn a visit into an enquiry, fix that first: more visibility for a page that does not convert is money spent in the wrong order, which is exactly where the enquiries are actually being lost.
But stopping entirely because “AI has killed SEO” usually means quietly ceding the ground to the competitor who did not stop. Search is still where customers go when they need something. The winners are simply decided earlier, inside the answer itself.
Yes, for any business whose customers search before they buy. The goal has shifted from collecting clicks to being the business named in the answer, and the work, clear pages, genuine reviews, consistent details, content that answers real questions, is the same work that always made SEO pay. Judge it on enquiries, not visitor numbers.
No. AI Overviews summarise the sources Google already trusts, so being quotable is the new prize, and that comes from SEO work, not instead of it. Stopping simply makes a competitor more likely to be the name the AI repeats.
Track enquiries by source: calls, forms and bookings that began with search. Ask your agency to show visibility in AI answers and map results as well as rankings; Google Search Console will show how clicks and impressions for your important searches are changing. Fewer visits producing the same enquiries means it is working; fewer visits and fewer enquiries means something needs to change.
Enquiries and their sources first. Then visibility: whether you appear in AI summaries, map results and organic listings for the searches that matter. Rankings and Search Console traffic charts belong in the appendix, as context, not as the headline.
Not on current evidence. About one in five searches produced an AI summary in Pew’s March 2025 data, concentrated on question-style research searches. Buying-intent searches still show maps, ads and listings, and businesses are still chosen from them every day.
[1] Pew Research Center, “Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results” (22 July 2025). https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-users-are-less-likely-to-click-on-links-when-an-ai-summary-appears-in-the-results/
[2] Seer Interactive AIO impact study, reported by Search Engine Land, “Google AI Overviews drive 61% drop in organic CTR, 68% in paid” (4 November 2025). https://searchengineland.com/google-ai-overviews-drive-drop-organic-paid-ctr-464212
