The SEO landscape in 2025 looks very different from 2022. AI Overviews appear in over 30% of search results, ChatGPT and Perplexity are sending measurable referral traffic, and the effectiveness of AI-generated content has collapsed as Google's quality raters and algorithms have gotten better at identifying it. Here is what our data across 25+ client accounts shows.
What AI Overviews Mean for Click-Through Rates
AI Overviews have reduced click-through rates for informational queries significantly — in some niches by 30-40% for pages that previously ranked in position 1-3. However, the impact is heavily category-dependent. Local service queries ("plumber near me"), comparison queries ("best CRM for small business"), and high-intent commercial queries ("hire a personal injury lawyer") are largely unaffected because AI Overviews rarely appear for these. If your content strategy focuses on bottom-funnel, commercial intent content, the AI Overview impact is manageable.
What's Actually Dead
Thin content optimised purely for a single keyword phrase with no genuine expertise or unique information. Content produced by AI without human expert review, editing, and enhancement. Exact-match anchor text link building schemes. Guest posting on irrelevant low-quality sites for link acquisition. These approaches were declining before AI disruption — they are now essentially worthless.
What Still Works (And Works Better Than Ever)
Genuine expert content from practitioners with demonstrated expertise (EEAT — Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust — is now a primary ranking signal). First-hand experience, original data, and proprietary research. Video content embedded in articles (increases time-on-page and engagement signals). Technical SEO fundamentals: Core Web Vitals, internal linking, structured data, crawlability. And perhaps most importantly: brand signals — mentions, citations, and searches for your brand name are increasingly correlated with ranking performance in competitive niches.
