AI DISCOVERY
AI Overviews launched. Here is what 30 days of SERP data looked like.
Google rolled AI Overviews to all US users on 14 May 2024. Within 72 hours, screenshots of it recommending glue on pizza and eating rocks were everywhere. Within two weeks, Google had reduced AIO frequency by an estimated 60% across most query categories (tracked via SE Ranking and BrightEdge datasets).
Week-by-week volatility log
Week 1 (May 14 to 20): AIO appeared on ~27% of tracked queries across our 2,800-query monitoring set. Click-through on position 1 dropped immediately, median -19%.
Week 2 (May 21 to 27): The viral-error news cycle hit. Google rolled back AIO for many health, safety, and civic queries. AIO presence dropped to ~13%.
Week 3 (May 28-Jun 3): Stabilisation. AIO appeared on ~15% of queries. The queries it survived on were heavily informational, low-risk, and often "how to" or "what is" shape.
Week 4 (Jun 4 to 10): First signs of citation pattern. Reddit, Wikipedia, and official product docs dominated cited sources. Our sample showed Reddit cited in 14% of AIOs, up from near-zero in 2023.
Three things we expected and got wrong
We expected AIO to mostly affect informational queries. Correct.
We expected clicks to the cited sources to rise. Wrong. Cited sources gained roughly 3% CTR on average, while sites not cited but still on page one lost 15 to 30%. The citation bump is much smaller than the page-wide loss.
We expected schema markup (FAQPage, HowTo) to correlate with being cited. No measurable correlation in the first 30 days.
What we told clients to do (and still do)
Do not make content changes in the first 30 days of a rollout. The SERP is not stable.
Track AIO presence at query level, not site level. Site-wide averages hide everything interesting.
Keep writing for humans first. The content cited inside AIOs reads like it was written for humans.
Sources: internal 2,800-query daily monitoring; SE Roundtable coverage; BrightEdge AIO tracking, May-June 2024.