New Series: AI Overviews

Since Knowatoa’s launch, we’ve been tracking Google’s Gemini AI as part of our core set of AI search services.

Under the hood, Google has publicly stated that versions of Gemini are used for their AI Overviews and AI Mode search surfaces.

However, AI Overviews have become more consequential for search marketers as they continue to evolve.

The continued growth of AI Overviews (across more countries, languages, users, and sessions) has resulted in a significant drop in click-throughs from search results to sites across the entire web.

At Knowatoa, our take is that this shift changed Google’s “contract” with the open web. It’s no longer a given that they will send traffic to your site for anything but a navigational query (and even then make you bid against your organic ranks).

Given this, we delayed adding direct AI Overviews tracking, as they haven’t often been part of the content strategy equation.

What’s changed? We’ve discovered that by combining our Deep Classification of keywords and questions features, we’re now able to identify and track the questions where users are:

• seeking recommendations
• trying to determine if your service is right for them
• comparing you to competitors

This allows us to be much more strategic and helpful than was previously possible.

This is part of our larger goal of providing ranking data alongside the context needed to guide your content and search strategy.