The popularity gained by ChatGPT in the last few years has pushed competition between big tech companies, such as Google and Microsoft, in the development of products based on generative AI, with the integration of important innovations in search engines.
What is AI Overview
The introduction of AI Overview by Google arrived in Italy at the end of March 2025, appearing directly at the top of the search results page, usually before the list of organic results and sponsored ads.
AI Overview proposes a synthetic and articulated answer, which can include lists, examples, images and videos. By synthesizing and combining the information from multiple web pages, it suggests a contextualized and complete answer, reporting the list of the used links.
The sources used to build the answers can be clicked and the list of traditional organic links still appears, but users often find the information they need directly on Google’s search page without clicking any further links (zero-click searches).
What are the effects of AI Overview
The new content of search results pages is reshaping the behavior of users, who often do not need further investigation, causing a drop in the traffic of many websites.
The impact of the AI Overview on traffic is not uniform but varies significantly by industry area and, mostly, by search intent.
Low-intent traffic, which is primarily informative or exploratory, is often satisfied and ends directly on the results page. The user is looking for clarifications, definitions or tutorials and the traditional destinations (Thematic Blogs, Forums/Community) suffer the greatest effects.
High-intent traffic is instead related to users who are likely to take a active action, such as purchasing a product, booking in a hotel or signing up for a service. Users, in this case, show high interest and click on links, going beyond the simple search for generic information. The type of sites visited is therefore E-Commerce, Restaurants, Hotels.
To evaluate the impact on site traffic, we analyzed the change in volumes related to organic searches for a heterogeneous sample of Italian sites, comparing the number of these visits in September 2025 with the same month of the previous year.
The figure is representing the average change in the organic traffic of the sites divided by category. You can see how Blog, Forum/Community show the greatest impact with an average drop of the 27%, while E-Commerce and Hotel/Restaurants have, on average, maintained or slightly increased the received visits.
What is the impact for blogs
Blogs are the main sources of a wide range of content; their objective is to inform, analyze, educate or entertain. So, they are among the types of sites most penalized by the introduction of generative AI tools.
As shown in the figure, the impact is observed in all the thematic sectors, especially Science & Culture, Cars & Engines, Finance and Technology.
Opportunities and Open Issues
Tools that use generative artificial intelligence are significantly changing the way users access information online. The visibility of a website, especially Blogs, requires new approaches and optimizations. The goal now is to be selected and cited as a useful and authoritative source by AI to appear at the top of the results page.
These innovations are raising important issues, that will be debated in the near future, about reliability and copyright.
AI answers often contain inaccuracies and do not reflect the content of the original source.
Moreover, training models on web pages for unauthorized uses has been disapproved from publishers.
Then, the issue is open about the economic sustainability of this new digital ecosystem in which value is extracted from online sources and at the same time the incentive to visit them decreases.