How Google’s AI Overviews Are Affecting Senior Living SEO

Google began rolling out AI Overviews in May 2024. What are AI Overviews, and how have they affected senior living SEO? Let’s discuss.

What are AI Overviews (AIO)?

When you conduct a search in Google, you’ll sometimes see AI-generated answers and summaries at the top of the search engine results page (SERP). This space has traditionally been reserved for paid ads. When AI Overviews appear, paid ads have less visibility since they’re placed farther down the page. Organic search listings have also been pushed down.

We did a search on “what is senior living.” Below is the screenshot from our desktop.

Many people are concerned about the length, depth, and breadth of AI’s responses. If all the info a person needs appears on the SERP, why would they click into a website?

Here’s the thing: We’ve been here before. Remember when featured snippets started becoming more prevalent? Google is constantly evolving in terms of how it answers people’s queries. For Google, its number one priority is creating an excellent experience for users (so they don’t go trotting off to a different search engine).

AI Overviews are simply part of this evolution. And yes, businesses and content creators will need to adjust accordingly.

But again, that’s not new.

Do AI Overviews show up on all searches?

Nope. When Google began rolling out AI Overviews, the overviews showed up in 65% of queries, according to Search Engine Land.

However, by July 2024, AI Overviews appeared in only 12% of queries and fell to 7% by the end of the month. Specific industries like education, entertainment, and e-commerce saw the biggest drops.

Why the drops?

AI Overviews are far from perfect. Some embarrassing, incorrect, and downright dangerous results happened early on.

And they’re still proving a bit flaky.

One of our writers conducted a search on August 16, 2024, about who won the Patriots game the previous night. (In real life, the Pats lost.) AIO served up a big fail for a seemingly simple query.

Remember, AI is famous for hallucinating, i.e., making stuff up. (However, Google says AIO doesn’t typically hallucinate like ChatGPT.)

In any event, Google initially let up on the gas a bit as it worked on improving AIO’s output.

Where do things stand now with AI Overviews?

Honestly? It’s a moving target, and volatility is the name of the game. Google is doing a lot of experimenting with this feature—and not just in response to its own tests. It’s also responding to competition, most notably from OpenAI’s SearchGPT. (OpenAI is the organization that brought us ChatGPT.)

Google appears to be all in with AIO. Over the summer, it announced it was expanding AI Overviews globally.

Have AI Overviews affected site traffic?

Ah, that’s the million-dollar question. Since the roll-out, so many brands have feared the worst—that SEO best practices as we know them are kaput, that they will see their organic traffic nosedive, and that the paid-ad game will become even harder to win.

Interestingly enough, according to Search Engine Land, two large publishers (Ziff Davis and Dotdash Meredith) reported a “negligible” impact in their Q2-2024 shareholder letters. But again, that was Q2.

The jury is still out as to how much of an impact AI Overviews will have over the long term.

But in the short term, here’s some good news. An analysis of 36,000 keywords by seoClarity found that 99.5% of the time, at least one of the top 10 organic search results was included as a source in Google’s AI Overviews.

The takeaway: Ranking highly in Google remains one of the best ways to get featured in AI Overviews.

What should senior living marketers do?

Our recommendation is the same as it ever was: Remain aware, but don’t panic.

Remember, SEO has never been a static “thing.” And while AI Overviews might be one of the biggest disruptors we’ve seen in recent memory, that doesn’t mean the sky is falling all at once. (HubSpot has a great piece on the evolution of search.)

And here’s even more good news: Local search queries are the least likely to trigger AI Overviews, according to Bright Edge, which has been doing extensive research about AIOs.

For example, people searching for “senior living near me” get served “normal” results based on their location. (The monthly search volume for that phrase is a whopping 49,500, according to Semrush.)

That’s why optimizing for local search, which has always been important, is even more critical now, given AIO. (And this includes making sure you have a fabulous Google Business Profile.)

What about those all-important educational queries during the awareness stage?

Currently, the types of searches most likely to trigger AI Overviews are questions (i.e., what is senior living, how much does senior living cost, etc.).

If you’re worried you can’t compete with sites that already rank well for common questions, try taking a broader view of where and how you share educational content:

Do more videos, full stop. We’re always telling clients to focus more on making videos and sharing them widely. YouTube (which Google owns) also acts as a search engine.

For example, according to Vid IQ (which focuses on YouTube search volume), the phrase “what is senior living” has a monthly search volume of nearly 1700 with moderate competition. So, turn that blog post you likely already have about “what is senior living” into a video to maintain visibility and get more traction via YouTube.

Keep in mind that once you’ve done one video, you can repurpose it across multiple channels:

• Share across all social media channels where your community has a presence, like Instagram and Facebook.
• Include on relevant website pages and blog posts
• Embed in emails

Focus on optimizing for other search engines, including SearchGPT once it launches. We’ll do another post at some point about OpenAI’s SearchGPT, which is one of the biggest threats to Google. Note: As we go to press, SearchGPT isn’t widely available yet, but it’s just a matter of time.

Don’t be afraid of a zero-click world. We’ve been living in it for a while. Here’s an excellent article from SparkToro about our zero-click reality and why marketers should embrace it.

Remember, this too shall pass. Seriously, every time Google does something big—or it says it’s going to—everyone freaks out. Sometimes the freak-out is for good reason. But other times? Not so much. (We’re looking at you, abandoned plans for third-party cookie deprecation.)

Bottom line: Don’t panic about AI Overviews.

Continue following best practices for senior living SEO, and make sure you’ve optimized your site for local search.

Need help? That’s what we’re here for. Get in touch. We’re always happy to jump on a free brainstorming call.