Zero-Click Search and the Rise of AI Overviews
Has your organic traffic jumped off a cliff from late 2024 into 2025?
If the answer is yes, know that it wasn’t your fault.
Traffic loss has been happening to virtually everyone since Google’s AI Overviews (AIOs) became a thing back in May 2024.
Even major companies like Daily Mail and HubSpot have reported severe traffic losses of up to 89%, so you shouldn’t feel bad if your traffic has also taken a nosedive.
The reason why this is happening is actually pretty simple.
Thanks to search features like AIOs and Featured Snippets, it’s easier than ever for users to find the information they need on the search results page.
Things like quick definitions and answers are easily handled by AIOs, negating the need for users to visit any organic web results.
This is called a zero-click search, and they’re extremely common now. According to research, 60% of all searches ended without a click in 2024, and they’ve become even more prevalent alongside the rise of AIOs in mid 2025.
At face value, this may seem like the SEO apocalypse that marketers have been warning about for years.
Yet, if you scratch the surface, you’ll discover that search marketing has taken on a new form.
While brands like HubSpot saw their traffic fall dramatically, they’re still able to generate leads and sales through visibility in AI search.
In this guide, we’ll teach you how AIOs and zero-click searches have altered the search landscape, including how to optimize for AI search, so don’t go anywhere!
What Are AI Overviews? How Have They Changed SEO?
If you’ve Googled anything since March 5th, 2025, you’ve undoubtedly encountered AI Overviews.
While AIOs made their official debut in May 2024, initial backlash over quality caused a prompt rollback, meaning they only appeared for a handful of informational searches.
After receiving a Gemini 2.0 upgrade in March 2025, AI Overviews started to become extremely prominent for all types of searches, not just informational ones.
According to research by Xponent21, Google AIOs appear for more than 50% of all searches.
Here’s what one looks like:
It’s important to note that AIOs are now abridged and don’t take up the entire visible portion of the results page like they used to.
As a result, it’s possible to view the #1-ranked organic result without scrolling down (unless there are lots of Sponsored ads):
Currently, the default view provides a concise, Featured Snippet-like answer to the user’s query. If they want to view more of the AIO, they can hit the Show More button.
Here’s what that looks like:
The expanded AIO provides more in-depth information about the query, and the source panel is fully visible.
Google also uses AIOs to hook users into its AI Mode:
This is concerning to some because Google’s AI Mode provides even fewer hyperlinks to users and takes on a conversational format similar to ChatGPT.
While AIOs are definitely helpful to users, they’ve exacerbated the zero-click search issue.
Zero-click searches first became a problem because of Featured Snippets and other special search results that provided quick answers to user queries.
Here’s what a Featured Snippet looks like:
As you can see, it’s similar to an AI Overview, but far less in-depth, and only links to one source.
Also, Featured Snippets are slowly being phased out by AIOs (as mentioned in the Featured Snippet above, ironically enough).
While Featured Snippets would occasionally lead to zero-click searches, AIOs have made them FAR more common, which is what we’ll explore next.
The Zero-Click Problem: Why It’s Likely Here to Stay
If you’re holding onto organic SEO as your primary digital marketing method, we’ve got bad news.
The zero-click search problem isn’t going anywhere and will probably continue to get even worse. AIOs, Featured Snippets, and AI search platforms like Perplexity and ChatGPT are all causing CTRs (click-through rates) to plummet, and it’s not just for informational queries anymore.
Across the board, websites are seeing drops in CTRs for informational, commercial, AND transactional keywords.
According to a study Ahrefs conducted in April 2025, the very presence of an AIO for a keyword can reduce clicks by up to 34.5%.
For some industries, like news sites, the loss of traffic is even more significant.
Daily Mail is intimately aware of this, as they saw their website’s CTR drop from 25.2% to 2.8% on desktop whenever an AIO was present, which is an 89% decrease!
But how did their mobile visibility fare?
Pretty much just as bad.
On mobile devices, their CTR still dropped by 87%, so AIOs can impact mobile searches just as much as they do desktop searches.
News sites have it especially hard because AIOs provide quick, succinct summaries of news stories that most users find sufficient, negating the need to click through to any actual news websites.
This has sparked a lot of controversy amongst online publishers that rely on organic clicks to drive revenue. In July 2025, a group of publishers filed an official complaint to the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority related to Google’s AI Overviews.
Their claim?
That Google AIOs cite their content at a considerable cost to their publications. They produce the content that AIOs cite, but, through zero-click searches, Google claims all the financial reward.
It’s important to note that no one is technically stopping users from clicking through to cited sources, as AIOs list plenty of links that users can click on. The problem is that AIOs are often satisfactory enough for users to click away from the results entirely.
AI Causing Traffic to Fall Off a Cliff: HubSpot
Before we move on to the silver lining (don’t worry, there is a light at the end of the tunnel), let’s look at another example of AIOs completely disrupting a website’s traffic.
The catch is that they have already found ways to start recovering from the loss.
CRM powerhouse Hubspot saw an 80% decrease in its blog traffic because of Google’s AIOs (and other factors, like content relevance) in 2024.
This was shocking because Hubspot’s blog was massively successful and one of the biggest business blogs around. Not that long ago, their blog was averaging 10 million visitors per month.
By early 2025, that number had plummeted to under 2 million.
The timing speaks volumes.
It was clear that AIOs were having an extremely negative impact on Hubspot’s traffic generation. Recent updates to Google’s algorithm focusing on Helpful Content likely also played a role.
Let’s take a closer look at some specifics:
- Hubspot’s blog strategy focused on content volume, which used to be a viable tactic. However, this caused them to create lots of content that didn’t directly relate to their flagship CRM product. They targeted lots of broad informational keywords, leading to slightly off-topic posts about cover letters, resumes, and real estate, just to name a few.
- Some of HubSpot’s earlier content could qualify as thin or unhelpful by Google’s updated quality standards (i.e., less than 700 words).
- Much of the informational content HubSpot produced was easily quotable by LLMs, leading to a sharp increase in zero-click searches. Users were able to find quick definitions and answers to questions in AI Overviews and ChatGPT-style responses, so they didn’t need to click through to HubSpot’s website.
All these factors contributed to the perfect storm that wiped out most of HubSpot’s organic traffic. However, they didn’t sit idly by and let their brand disappear into the abyss.
The tactics they used to help recover from the loss
HubSpot remained proactive after their traffic loss, and they didn’t remain set in their ways.
At Inbound 2025, HubSpot’s annual Marketing and Sales conference, they had already developed a new marketing methodology called Loop Marketing.
The underlying philosophy is that trust now matters more than clicks, and it emphasizes brand identity, AI search optimization, and diversifying traffic sources.
It was their marketing team’s response to taking such a heavy traffic loss.
Here’s the Loop Marketing framework:
- Express – You need to clearly express what your brand is about, including establishing a clear brand identity, point of view, and areas of focus.
For HubSpot, this meant refining their content strategy to focus on topics more closely related to their CRM product. Instead of targeting bunches of informational keywords, they focus on strategic topics tied to their product offerings.
- Tailor – This refers to personalization at scale by combining AI with data and automation to make each customer message feel like it was crafted specifically for them.
You can use this same principle to segment your audience into groups based on things like intent. From there, you can tailor unique pieces of content for each audience segment (landing pages, CTAs, emails, etc.).
- Amplify – Here’s where AI search optimization enters the picture. HubSpot now acknowledges that AI Overviews and AI search tools play a major role in the discovery and trust-building process. Thus, optimizing your content for them is now a best practice.
The team also recommends diversifying traffic sources so that all your eggs aren’t in one basket. Instead of betting everything on organic traffic from Google, you should equally emphasize channels like social media, podcasts, and newsletters.
- Evolve – The final step is to rapidly collect and learn from feedback. This also entails using data, automation, and AI to make strategy tweaks in real time. The idea is to create small cycles of improvement that compound as you re-engage the loop.
In other words, HubSpot saw the light and realized that search marketing has evolved beyond only generating organic traffic.
The way forward is to solidify brand identity, establish topical authority, and build trust with audiences and LLMs.
How Businesses Can Adapt to the New Search Landscape
HubSpot’s story proves that it’s possible for brands to successfully adapt to the way the search landscape is changing, but it doesn’t happen by holding onto the past.
Here are the top ways brands can adapt to zero-click searches and AI Overviews.
Own your brand mentions
At this point, most marketers know that brand mentions are a significant visibility factor for the LLMs that power AI Overviews and tools like ChatGPT.
As a result, brand mentions have become the new backlinks. Brands are eager to earn as many mentions as they can on high-quality websites.
What they’re forgetting (or simply don’t know) is that it’s equally as important to own your brand mentions.
By this, we mean controlling your brand’s narrative wherever its name appears.
That entails:
- Ensuring you build brand mentions that follow the same narrative and reflect your brand’s identity
- Monitoring your brand mentions to ensure accuracy
This is incredibly important because consistency is key to establishing your brand as a trusted entity for relevant prompts.
If your brand name gets mentioned on high authority websites but in wildly different contexts, you risk throwing off LLMs. As a result, an LLM may falsely interpret your brand as separate entities, which will wreak havoc on your AI visibility.
In short, owning your brand’s narrative is about reinforcing entity coherence.
Focus on the mid and bottom-half of your funnel
As the kids would say, informational keywords are ‘cooked,’ so it’s not really worth trying to generate leads through top-of-the-funnel content anymore.
It’s far too easy for users to learn what they want to know through digestible bits of information found in chatbot responses and AI Overviews.
That’s not to say that you should abandon producing informative content, as it can still help build brand awareness and trust.
It is to say that the bulk of your efforts should go toward middle and bottom-of-the-funnel content, because this is what actually drives conversions.
Engage in Digital PR and community discussion
Digital PR techniques are perfect for the modern search landscape. Besides earning brand mentions and backlinks, digital PR involves creating the exact type of content that still attracts attention, like:
- Original research
- Expert interviews and thought leader content (deep analyses containing original insights)
- Newsjacked stories
This type of content also spurs discussion in community forums like Reddit, which also fuels AI visibility.
How HOTH AI Discover Protects You
If brands want to continue to thrive in the era of zero-click searches and AI Overviews, they must become the type of brand AI tools want to cite.
Our new product, AI Discover, is tailored to do just that.
It’s not a random product we threw together during a random lunch break, either. Instead, we decided to launch it because of the AI SEO success we were already having with clients.
For instance, one client generated 966% more AI Overviews after working with our team. Because of this, we knew we had tapped into something powerful.
That’s why we put together all our AI SEO best practices into AI Discover, the service that gets you noticed by AI search tools, and in turn, your audience.
As you’ve seen so far, the need to adapt to AI search is extremely urgent, so don’t wait to sign up for AI Discover!
Final Thoughts: Zero-Click Searches and AI Overviews
To summarize, SEO has fundamentally changed forever. If brands want to continue marketing through online search, they must improve their AI visibility while diversifying traffic sources.
Trying to keep generating traffic strictly through organic search results is a losing game, so do the smart thing and diversify to AI and other channels.
If you need expert help adapting to these new changes, book a free SEO consultation with our team.