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On this episode of The Engaging Marketeer Podcast, I’m going to be talking about something which started to come out mid to early 2024. We’re now in April 2025, and it’s something that a lot of website owners and a lot of businesses have been worried about—how it’s going to impact them. And they’re really starting to see these changes now with their own websites and the traffic that they’re receiving.
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So, cast your mind back about a year or so, and Google started playing about with AI overviews—AI responses, automated responses in search results that were replacing Google search results.
What used to happen was: when you searched for something in Google, and there was a page on the internet deemed the most important, accurate, or comprehensive for that query, Google would put it at the top of the search results as a featured snippet. It would be a box at the top, above the paid ads, above Google AdWords, above the number one ranking.
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It would have a little summary of what the page said, and then a link through to it. And any website could get a featured snippet. It didn’t matter how small your website was or how little content you had—although obviously, the more content, the better. It didn’t matter how small a business you were. It didn’t matter if you didn’t use Google Ads or any kind of paid advertising. None of that mattered.
All that really mattered was that your page on the internet was the single most comprehensive answer to that particular query. Then Google would say, “This is the featured snippet. This gives you the result. This is what you want.”
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And we at Engage Web had a lot of featured snippets for ourselves. We had a lot for our clients. And some of those snippets—I’ve talked about these before, I’ve done social media posts about them, written blogs—some were getting 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 views to the website every year.
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That’s a huge amount of traffic. If you’re getting tens of thousands of people visiting your website for a particular phrase that’s relevant to what you do—a question your target audience is asking—and they’re coming through to your website because you’re the best answer on the internet… that’s a lot. Potentially a lot of clients, a lot of leads, a lot of social media followers, people downloading your lead magnet, people exposed to your brand that otherwise wouldn’t be.
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To lose all of that is a frightening prospect. And that’s exactly what Google’s done. It’s said, “Right, featured snippets—we’ve had enough of that. We’re getting rid of them.”
All these websites that were getting thousands and thousands of visits per month, or per year—we want to keep those people ourselves. We don’t want to send them to other people’s websites.
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And in the digital marketing community, we were like, “Oh, this is going to be a problem.” And as it turns out… it is a bit of a problem.
Google said that instead of having one featured snippet, it was going to replace pretty much all of them with what’s called an AI overview—an artificial intelligence response based on a number of different sources.
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If you Google any question now, chances are you’re going to see an AI overview instead of a featured snippet. It pulls from different websites and writes its own automated, artificial intelligence response.
And the vast majority of them are bollocks. They don’t really understand the question. I’ve seen horrendous information, awful advice—completely wrong—because the artificial intelligence is artificial, but it’s not that intelligent. It’s pulling sources from God knows where to come together with this overview.
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But the real problem that’s affecting businesses and website owners is that the traffic they were getting to their websites… has now disappeared.
We’re seeing year-on-year stats for traffic to client websites—and our own websites—down 30, 40%. Huge numbers. A page that used to generate 50,000 views a year is now suddenly only generating a few hundred.
And it’s not the website’s fault. It’s nothing to do with the quality. It’s totally what Google has done.
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So what can you do about this?
Well, the important thing is: you need to be in the AI overview. You need to be one of the sources.
The way you do that is pretty much the same way you would have targeted featured snippets in the first place—by creating content around the exact question someone is asking.
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So, look at the kind of things you want to rank for. Look at the kinds of questions your target client is asking. Search that question in Google. See what the current AI overview is.
Then, analyze the sources in that AI overview. What does the content contain? What’s missing? What could you add value to?
That’s what you should be writing your content about—thorough, comprehensive content that includes what’s currently missing. That gives you the best opportunity to appear in the AI overview.
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It’s easy for me to keep saying this, but I assure you—it’s the best opportunity for you to appear within the AI overview. That puts you in the sources. It gives you credibility and some traffic.
Because think about this: the sites Google uses in AI overviews are the ones it trusts. It’s the ones it recommends. If you’re a contributor to that, you’re more likely to contribute to others, show up in rankings for others, get more exposure and traffic.
(07:14)
No—you will never replace the kind of traffic you were getting from featured snippets. Those days are gone.
Traffic for many websites peaked around 2023 or early 2024. The traffic they’ll get from 2025 onwards… it’ll never hit those heights again. Because Google has cut the legs out from under it.
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But you can appear in the AI overview.
And one final point on this: the one thing Google cannot currently do—although I’m sure it will at some point—is create AI overview video content. It’s not doing that yet.
A lot of AI overviews contain videos summarizing the topic or showing relevant content. And that video could be yours.
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For instance—and don’t check this specific search, I haven’t verified it—but I’ve done content around “how to deliver an effective 10-minute presentation at a networking meeting” or “effective presentation tips for BNI meetings.”
And in the AI overview, you’ll see different sources—some from my sites—and at the bottom, there’s a video embedded. That video could well be yours. For that one, it happens to be one of mine.
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So, create video content around the topic the AI overview is addressing. Be as comprehensive as possible. Put it on YouTube—obviously, because Google owns YouTube and prefers YouTube content.
Then put that video on your website. Get a transcript from it. Turn that into a blog. Put the blog underneath the video. Then put the full transcript underneath that.
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Link from the blog back to the YouTube video, and in the description of the video, link back to the blog. Set everything up nicely.
Then you’ve got a very good chance of your YouTube video being embedded into that AI overview, giving you more views, more potential leads, more subscribers, followers, and business.
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So that’s essentially what this podcast episode was about: AI overviews.
If you’re suffering from a loss of traffic to your website—if your analytics year-on-year show a big drop from 2023 or 2024—this is probably why.
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Look at your landing pages. Compare them year-on-year. You’ll likely find that a specific blog or page was getting tens of thousands of visits… and now it isn’t. It’s because the featured snippets have been replaced by AI overviews.
That’s the reason.
There are ways to mitigate this. You’ll never get that traffic back—but you can soften the blow, as I’ve discussed.
(11:15)
So, I hope that’s been useful. If you’ve seen this yourself, please let me know in the comments on the YouTube video for this.
Drop me any questions you’ve got—I’m happy to answer them or cover them in future podcast episodes. Leave me a review too—I really appreciate that.
And I’ll catch you on the next podcast.
