Trends in SEO with AI SERP Features: Is the Game Changing?

Google’s new search generative experience (SGE) offers AI Overviews in search results, and is arguably the most significant paradigm shift in the SEO space to date. Its implementation in 2025 has been transformative for search engine optimisation in Sydney and beyond, where the new focus is optimising content for AI-powered search engines. Let’s go over how AI search engine results pages (SERPs) fundamentally change how visibility is earned, as well as how users consume information.

Zero-Click Searches and the Need for Adaptation

Perhaps the most profound impact of AI-generated answers on SEO traffic is that Overviews provide pre-parsed and concise answers to queries right at the top of the SERP. In the case of an informational query like “Where is Bogota?”, as an example, users will be able to receive satisfactory answers without ever having to click through to a website. This introduces two main challenges:

1. Reduced visibility or “click-through rate” (CTR) across the board for sites oriented to traditional listings, or the conventional battle to rank within the top ten links of SERPs before 2025.
2. Significant loss of organic traffic to informational content in particular, because queries containing the words how to, what is, and explain will almost always trigger a synthesised Overview response.

A Shift Away from Keyword-Based Strategies

While traditional SEO isn’t dead, it will need to evolve toward generative engine optimisation or GEO. This will entail not just satisfying search crawlers, but becoming the consistently authoritative source AI chooses to cite from. This can be done through:

1. Understanding Google’s Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) and delivering on those principles in order to rank. Google’s AI model synthesises its Overviews from one or multiple sources based on those four metrics, so it pays to steer clear of generic content and instead focus on trust signals, originality, and depth.
2. Accommodating conversational search in anticipation of how users’ query styles are changing as they become accustomed to AI interfaces like Gemini or ChatGPT. This means more long-tail or conversational queries (e.g. What are the benefits of matcha?) and the rise of agentic searching (e.g. Find spas in my area with available slots this Saturday).
3. Optimising for machine readability by structuring content for easy synthesis on the AI’s part. This means prioritising clarity and extractability for the creation of Overviews, making use of headers, bullet points, FAQs, and more.

New Metrics for Success

Because clicks are slated to decrease dramatically, sites will need to demonstrate value via semantic relevance and positioning scores, as well as tracking their own brand mention rate. The latter is how often a given brand or site is cited or mentioned, even in Overviews that don’t result in clicks. These key performance indicators — along with direct or organic traffic — will be the new metrics to live by.

The advent of AI-driven SERPs might well be a threat to organic traffic for sites that refuse to evolve. For others, it can also be a tremendous opportunity to get in on the ground floor of the internet of the future.