If it feels like your hard-earned top rankings in Google Search matter a little less lately, it’s not just your imagination.

According to new data from BrightEdge, Google’s AI Overviews are becoming less likely to cite content in the top 10 organic search results, signaling yet another shift in how the search engine prioritizes — or bypasses — traditional SEO signals.

The drop? From 16% to 15% overlap between AI Overview citations and top 10 results — a subtle change with major implications. While a -1% change doesn’t sound like much, that’s a lot of uncited content in the top 10 when you consider the billions upon billions of searches that Google routinely processes.

A Symptom of Something Bigger

Sure, 1 percentage point doesn’t sound like much. But it’s just the latest clue that Google is rethinking what its search engine is even for — and where website publishers fit into the picture.

This theory isn’t just tinfoil-hat speculation. It’s now coming straight from the top.

In a recent profile of Elizabeth Reid, Google’s current Head of Search, a former high-ranking Google executive dropped this bombshell:

“Giving traffic to publisher sites is kind of a necessary evil.”

Yes, you read that right.

The same Google that built its empire on crawling, indexing, and ranking our websites now sees sending traffic to publishers as incidental to its bigger goals. According to the same profile, voice, visual, and ambient search are the future, and the search bar itself — once the crown jewel of Google UX — will soon become less prominent.

What That Has to Do With AI Overviews

Reid confirmed what many SEOs suspected: AI Overviews are affected by core updates. BrightEdge’s post-March core update data backs that up.

Here’s how citation overlap changed in key industries:

  • Travel: +6.6 percentage points in citations of non-top 10 results
  • Entertainment: +4.9 points
  • Restaurants: +4.6 points

In plain English: ranking in the top 10 doesn’t guarantee AI visibility. And in many cases, pages outside the top 10 are now more likely to be cited in those summaries.

That’s both weird and a big deal. It’s weird because the first page of Google are supposed to be where the more relevant search results are and it’s a big deal since AI Overviews rarely send meaningful traffic. You’re now potentially competing with Google’s own answers, with fewer clicks and less attribution to show for it.

What This Means for the SEO Community

Google’s new behavior might feel frustrating, but understanding it helps us adapt. By realizing the following, we can adjust our SEO and general marketing strategies for the changes that have happened and those that are yet to come:

  • AI Overviews are central to Google’s strategy. Google wants to become your ever-present assistant, not just a search engine that sends people away.
  • Classic SEO isn’t dead, but it’s no longer the whole game. You need to optimize for both AI summarization and organic ranking — separately and together.
  • Your content needs to anticipate follow-up questions, address context, and surface value in formats Google’s AI likes to extract.

This isn’t just a core update quirk. It’s a glimpse into a post-click SEO reality, where content creators fight for visibility in a SERP designed to reduce clicks, not increase them.

If you’ve been optimizing purely for rankings, it’s time to expand your playbook.

Who’s Getting Hurt by This?

Let’s not sugarcoat it: AI Overviews may be a bigger deal than they first appeared, and not in a good way for most website owners.

Right now, they’re already reducing visibility for top-ranking sites. But the longer-term danger is that Google is shifting from being a referrer of traffic to being the final destination. And if that’s the case, it’s small and mid-sized publishers who will feel the squeeze the most. As an agency that handles 50+ websites at any given time ranging from SMEs to multinational behemoths, here’s who we’re seeing as the most exposed from an organic traffic loss perspective:

  • Independent bloggers, affiliate marketers, niche content creators. These are the folks who rely on every visit, every click, and every conversion to make their sites viable. When Google’s AI summarizes your best content without attribution or link placement, it can quietly gut your business model.
  • News outlets and local publishers.  Already hurting from declining ad revenues and changes in user behavior, these groups may see even fewer referrals as AI Overviews answer queries outright, eliminating the need to go to the source in many cases.
  • E-commerce and lead generation sites – If your product descriptions, comparison tables, or reviews are being paraphrased by Google’s AI with no traffic in return, you’re essentially being disintermediated by the very platform you depend on.

Who Might Be Less Affected?

  • Large brands and enterprises. Big companies with direct traffic, brand recall, and multi-channel presence can afford a hit to their organic numbers. They’ll likely still appear in AI citations (when Google chooses to attribute), and their authority may even give them an edge.
  • Content aggregators and platforms. Ironically, platforms that syndicate or host third-party content (think marketplaces, Q&A forums, or review aggregators) may continue to perform well because of their structural value to Google’s information graph.

Legal and Ethical Questions Linger

There’s also the massive legal and ethical elephant in the room: Google’s AI — like all large language models — is built by scraping, training on, and remixing content created by other people, often without clear consent or compensation. Key issues have been cited around the world, including:

  • No attribution. AI Overviews often omit links or fail to credit the original source. This not only limits click-through opportunities but also violates the spirit of the open web, where visibility and discoverability are the primary rewards for publishing content.
  • Intellectual property concerns. While U.S. copyright law around AI-generated summaries is still evolving, many publishers argue that LLMs are producing derivative works based on their intellectual property — without permission.
  • The data paradox. Google benefits from crawling and indexing fresh content, but if AI Overviews replace the need to click through to that content, publishers have little incentive to keep producing. Eventually, this could degrade the quality of the content ecosystem that feeds Google itself.
  • Ethics of competition. Google is now competing with the very sites it indexes, displaying AI answers sourced from those same sites — while giving them less visibility and fewer clicks in return. The ethical conflict here is undeniable, especially when Google’s internal leaders are now openly framing traffic to publishers as a “necessary evil.”

We’re entering an era where SEO is no longer just a marketing tactic — it’s a survival strategy. And the rules of that strategy are being rewritten in real time by a company that’s growing less interested in sending traffic and more focused on keeping users within its own ecosystem.

For the average publisher, this should be a wake-up call. The open web needs more than technical optimization — it needs legal protections, clearer attribution standards, and platforms that don’t just take, but also give back.