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Where they appear, and where they do not
An AI Overview is a generated summary Google places above the conventional results, with a small set of linked sources beside it. They arrived in UK results during 2024 and have since expanded, alongside AI Mode, which takes the same idea further into a conversational session.
Google has not published a rule for which queries trigger one, and the behaviour changes without announcement, so anything anyone tells you here is observation rather than documentation. What is consistently observable in trade searches is a split along intent.
| Query shape | Example | What tends to sit at the top |
|---|---|---|
| Explanatory | “why is my boiler losing pressure” | Reliably a generated summary. The question has a settled answer and no local component. |
| Cost and comparison | “how much does a flat roof cost uk” | Frequently a summary, often with ranges assembled from several sources. |
| Regulatory | “do I need building regs for a rewire” | Frequently a summary, and a good one, because the answer is documented. |
| Service plus place | “roofers in Ashford” | Map pack usually still dominant. A summary appears less often and sits with the local results rather than replacing them. |
| Urgent local | “emergency electrician near me” | Local results and calls. This is the search shape least disturbed by any of it. |
That pattern is not guaranteed to hold. It is what the results look like now, and the honest instruction is to check your own queries rather than trust a table, including this one. Anyone claiming a fixed percentage of trade queries that trigger an overview is quoting a sample you cannot inspect.
Which traffic you actually lose
The mechanism is simple and worth stating without either panic or denial. When a question is answered above the results, the person who only wanted the answer has no reason to click. Your position has not moved. The click has gone.
For a trade business, the traffic most exposed to this is the traffic furthest from a job: the explanatory pages, the definition pages, the “what is the difference between” pages. Much of that was never enquiry traffic. It filled a graph. If your organic visits fall while your enquiries do not, that is what happened, and the right response is relief rather than a project.
Where it genuinely costs you is narrower and more annoying. Cost pages are the clearest case. “How much does X cost” is the classic consideration-stage search, it is exactly the sort of query that attracts a summary, and a firm that had built a good, honest costing page was capturing someone in the middle of deciding. Some of that now gets resolved above the fold, and sometimes with a range assembled from sources less careful than yours.
Two consolations, both real. Being cited in the summary still puts your name in front of the person even when they do not click, and the clicks that do come through after a summary tend to be from people who read it and wanted more from a specific source. Neither restores the old volume, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest — but the shape of the loss is not the same as the size of the loss, which is why the analytics panic tends to overstate the commercial damage.
Why the map pack got more important
The clearest strategic consequence for a local trade firm is not really about AI at all. It is that the proportion of your organic enquiries arriving through local results rather than blue links has gone up, because the blue links took the hit and the local results largely did not.
A generated paragraph is a poor answer to “who can come out on Thursday”. The map pack, with its ratings, its photographs, its opening hours and its call button, answers that question directly, and Google has no obvious incentive to displace the surface that best serves urgent local intent.
So the sensible reallocation for most firms is toward the things that feed local results and away from volume content:
- The Google Business Profile itself — categories, services, photographs of real jobs, accurate hours including bank holidays.
- A review flow that does not stop, because recency is visible and a profile that went quiet eighteen months ago looks like a business that did.
- Answering the phone, which is not a marketing tactic but determines the value of everything above it.
- Genuinely local pages for the towns you actually serve, with detail that could only have been written by someone who works there.
That is the same priority order our SEO service has used throughout, which is a slightly awkward thing to admit on a page about what changed. The honest version is that AI Overviews strengthened an existing argument rather than creating a new one.
Auditing your own pages against this
An afternoon in Search Console will tell you more than any commentary. Do it in this order.
Compare like periods on impressions and clicks
Take the last six months against the same six months a year earlier, at query level. You are looking for the specific pattern of impressions holding or rising while clicks fall, which is what a summary sitting above you looks like from underneath.
Separate informational queries from commercial ones
Split your queries into questions and hiring intent. If the decline is concentrated in the questions, you have lost the traffic that was least likely to ring. If it has reached service-plus-town queries, something else is going on and the cause is probably not AI Overviews at all.
Check your enquiry count over the same window
This is the number that decides whether there is a problem. Traffic is a proxy. Enquiries are the business. A twenty per cent fall in sessions with flat enquiries is a reporting story, not a commercial one.
Look at what is being cited instead
Run your lost queries by hand and read the sources beside the summary. Very often they are national aggregators, manufacturers or trade bodies, and that tells you whether the query was ever realistically yours to hold.
One limitation to hold in mind while you do this: Google reports AI Overview and AI Mode activity inside the Performance report's web search totals rather than as a separable line, so you cannot isolate those impressions. You are reading a shape in aggregated data, not a clean measurement. Our methodology page explains the general rule we apply to numbers like these, which is to say what they cannot prove at the same time as what they can.
Rewriting for the queries that kept the summary
For pages where the summary is now permanent, you have two options: give up the query, or aim to be the source the summary uses. The second is only worth attempting where the query was commercially meaningful in the first place.
What the cited sources on trade queries tend to have in common, observably:
- They commit to specifics. A stated range with the factors that move it beats “every job is different, contact us for a quote”, which is unusable to a summariser and only slightly more useful to a human.
- They are structured in liftable units. A question as a heading, the answer immediately beneath, one idea per section.
- They are current. Material costs and regulations move. Dated pages lose to updated ones on anything a summary would want to be right about.
- They declare who wrote them. A named person with a trade behind them is a different proposition from an anonymous page, both to a reader and to whatever is assessing credibility.
There is also a conversion adjustment worth making, separate from ranking. If part of your audience is now arriving pre-briefed by a summary, the page they land on should not repeat the basics at them. Get to the specifics, the proof and the ask sooner. That is a landing page question as much as a search one, and the guides index covers the page structure side of it in more depth.
What it means for the paid side
Ads still sit above and around these surfaces, and Google has been placing advertising within AI experiences. For a trade firm the practical position is unchanged: paid search remains the channel where you can trace a cost to a click to an enquiry, which is precisely what the AI surfaces cannot offer.
The scale of the UK market has not shifted either. The IAB UK Digital Adspend 2025 study put total UK digital ad spend at £40.5bn, with paid search accounting for £17.9bn of that. Search is not being abandoned by advertisers; the interface in front of it is changing.
Two adjustments are worth making. First, if your organic informational traffic has thinned, resist the urge to replace it by bidding on those same informational queries — they were low-intent when they were free and they are worse value when paid for. Second, watch impression share and cost per click on your core service terms rather than inferring anything from the overview above them; if there is a change in your auction it will show up there, in numbers you can actually audit. How we approach that is set out on the Google Ads page, and the comparison pages cover the ads-versus-SEO decision for firms weighing where the next pound goes.
Worth repeating, since it comes up on every call: there is no published independent UK cost-per-click benchmark broken down by industry, so any reallocation argument built on an industry average CPC is built on a figure neither of us can check.
What to watch, monthly
Four numbers and one habit, reviewed once a month, will keep you properly informed without turning this into a second job.
- Enquiries, by source. The only figure that settles arguments. If this holds, most of the rest is noise.
- Search Console clicks and impressions split between informational and commercial queries, so a fall in one is never mistaken for a fall in both.
- Google Business Profile calls and direction requests, which is where the local demand is now concentrated.
- Referrals from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and gemini.google.com in analytics. Usually small, occasionally revealing, and a useful early indicator of whether you are being named elsewhere.
- Ten manual queries, run the same way each month, recorded with the date. Not a measurement, but the only way to see what your customers see.
The instinct this should all produce is a calm one. Something real changed in how people get answers, it took some traffic that was never going to ring you, and it made the local surfaces and the reviews attached to them more decisive than they already were. The firms struggling with it are mostly firms that were relying on informational traffic to disguise a weak local presence. If you would like the specific version for your trade, the industry pages go through how enquiries behave sector by sector, the results page shows the four sectors where our own advertising data comes from, and a call is the quickest way to find out which side of the line your pages sit on.
Rather have someone else do this?We run exactly this for trade and construction firms across the UK. Call and we will tell you what is realistic in your area, including when the answer is that it is not worth it.
Call 07443 392243WhatsAppCommon questions
Have AI Overviews killed local SEO?
No, and for local trade searches they have arguably strengthened the parts that matter. The map pack, reviews and the profile itself are largely untouched, and they were already where most local enquiry traffic came from. What has been squeezed is informational content ranking in blue links, which for most trade firms was the traffic least likely to produce a job.
Can I stop my site appearing in AI Overviews?
Only partially, and at a cost. AI Overviews are generated from the ordinary Google index, so the Google-Extended robots token does not remove you from them — that controls generative training and grounding use. Google's snippet controls, such as nosnippet and max-snippet, do limit what can be shown, but they limit your normal search snippets too. For a business that wants enquiries, that is usually a poor trade.
Why is a national site cited instead of me?
Often because the query was never local. A question about what a material costs nationally, or how a regulation works, is a question a trade body or a national publisher is a natural source for. The useful response is not to fight for that query but to write the version that is genuinely local and specific, which a national site cannot credibly produce.
My traffic dropped. How do I know AI Overviews caused it?
You cannot know with certainty, because Google folds AI Overview and AI Mode activity into web search totals rather than reporting it separately. What you can do is look for the signature: impressions holding while clicks fall, concentrated in question-shaped queries, with commercial queries unaffected. If service-plus-town queries fell too, look for another cause, such as a competitor, a technical fault or a core update.
Should I be writing content differently now?
Differently structured, not differently intended. Put the answer first, make headings match real questions, commit to specifics rather than hedging, date the page and say who wrote it. That is a better page for a human reader too, which is the main reason to do it — nobody outside Google can confirm what makes a source get selected.