Google Stealing Your Content = More Traffic? Allegedly

new study shows sites not cited in AI Overviews suffer

Author

Sean Markey
February 28, 2025

February 28th, 2025

Hi. Hello!

It’s me Sean Markey, writing you another daily SEO newsletter.

Apparently I sent yesterday’s newsletter without any kind of introduction or sign off, just assumed everyone subscribed to my previous newsletters would recognize me in an email like the owner of a dog that has been lost for three years (the dog, not the owner) instantly knowing me when they stumble upon me sleeping on the street of their inbox like

In this metaphor you are the dog owner, I am the stupid dog that forgot to make an introduction or mention my name at all.

ANYWAY, here is another great SEO email.

A WORD FROM CONTENTBRIEFS.COM

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AI Overviews

Even though they suck shit, Google's AI Overviews are essential for survival (according to this study)

An AI Overview doesn’t even show up if you search “what is an AI overview,” you just get this basic bitch featured snippet instead. 😢

On the heels of yesterday’s piece about Chegg suing Google for stealing all of their content and serving it up in AI Overviews, today I’m talking about a data-backed study that shows how irrelevant your brand may become if you’re not showing up in the AI Overviews.

Here’s the rich, creamy center of this article:

1. Regardless of Intent, when AIOs are present, webpages benefit from being included

2. Informational Queries: AIO presence diverts traffic away from Top-Ranked Webpages (regardless of their inclusion) but increases traffic for Lower-Ranked Webpages

3. Transactional Queries: AIO inclusion adds more traffic to webpages across all SERP positions compared to any other type of AIO Exposure

4. op-Ranked Webpages and Lower-Ranked Webpages reacted differently to all forms of AIO Exposure, never exhibiting a statistically similar response

Adi Srikanth, Senior Data Scientists

The post is extremely… uh, written by a data scientist.

So if you really want to dig in to the numbers, all of the extremely visible numbers, recommend clicking through and having a good time.

Otherwise, I think the takeaway is pretty straightforward: this study says you should TRY and get into those AI Overviews, but the results of that can be mixed, as recently summarized by Search Engine Land:

NerdWallet CEO Tim Chen: “We’re seeing these features do a really good job of answering simple educational questions, and that’s affecting traffic to some of our non-commercial pages.”

Ziff Davis CEO Vivek Shah: “AI Overviews results are present in just 12% of our top queries. … Our analysis of year over year click through rates, specifically comparing queries with similar positions that now include AI Overviews, shows no material aggregate impact on performance. … In our analysis of queries where AI Overviews are present or and then are present today but were not present in the past and our search rank remained unchanged, the overall click through rate is also relatively unchanged.

So the takeaway: who knows! It’s probably bad, though.

It’s DEFINITELY bad your content is being stolen and reposted by Google into AI Overviews, but not being relevant or cool enough to even have your content stolen by Google and regurgitated into everyone’s hungry little baby bird mouths also probably doesn’t bode well…

It’s wild times out there, I guess.

I promise my next newsletter will not be about AI Overview…

~

That’s it for this edition of The SEO Newsletter, which, I’ll just say it again in case you missed it earlier, was written by Sean Markey—I remembered to say it this time.

So thank you for subscribing and reading my newsletter. Daily SEO newsletter.

Please hit reply if you liked this one, I do love hearing from people.

Until next time…