How Google AI Overviews Are Changing Paid Search

Every few weeks someone forwards me a screenshot of their own category term with an AI Overview sitting on top of it and asks whether paid search is finished. It is not. Ads still run above and below AI Overviews in every market where the feature appears, they are still getting clicked, and on queries that trigger an AI Overview the paid click-through rate has held up far better than the organic result underneath it. The click you lose to an AI Overview is mostly an organic click.

What has genuinely changed is the shape of the page, the way Google matches an ad to a query, and how little the platform will tell you about either. Below is what is actually confirmed, what the click data shows, and the four changes I would make to a UK account this month.

Where your ads can appear now

There are two separate things being called “ads in AI Overviews”, and conflating them is why so much advice on this is wrong.

Placement	Where it runs	What is eligible
Above or below the AI Overview	All 200+ markets where AI Overviews appear	Search, Shopping, Performance Max and App campaigns
Inside the AI Overview	English only, mobile and desktop, in 12 countries	Text and Shopping ads from Search, Shopping and Performance Max

That second row matters for anyone reading this from the UK. Google’s list of countries where ads serve within the AI Overview is Australia, Canada, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Malaysia, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore and the US. Britain is not on it. So if you are running a UK account, your ads are appearing around AI Overviews, not inside them, and any agency selling you an “AI Overview ad strategy” for a UK-only advertiser is selling you a placement you cannot currently buy.

Two more confirmed details worth holding on to. You cannot opt out of serving ads in AI Overviews. And Google does not show ads in AI Overviews for sensitive verticals including adult, alcohol, gambling, finance, healthcare and politics, so a chunk of accounts are unaffected by the in-overview placement entirely.

What the click data actually says

The honest answer is that paid and organic have moved in opposite directions, and the headlines have flattened that into one scary number.

Seer Interactive’s analysis, covering January 2025 to February 2026 across 53 brands and roughly 297 million paid impressions, found paid click-through rate on queries with an AI Overview rose from 14.64% to 16.21%. On queries without one, paid click-through fell from 25.98% to 21.85%. Organic told a harsher story: 3.19% down to 2.36% when an AI Overview was present.

Read that carefully, because there are three findings buried in it.

• Paid is not collapsing under AI Overviews. On AI Overview queries, paid click-through went up over the period, not down.
• Paid click-through is still lower on AI Overview queries than on clean ones, 16.21% against 21.85%. A longer page pushes everything down, ads included.
• The gap is closing from both ends. Clean pages are getting worse faster than AI Overview pages are getting better. The results page as a whole is getting harder to earn a click from, whether or not a generative answer sits on top.

So the planning assumption is not “AI Overviews killed my traffic”. It is that the same budget buys fewer, more expensive clicks across the board, and the searches that do click through arrive later in their thinking, because the overview already answered the basics.

The keyword shift nobody mentions

This is the change that will cost you money if you ignore it, and it gets far less airtime than the placement question.

Google matches ads in AI Overviews using both the user query and the content of the AI Overview itself. The unit of matching is no longer just the string someone typed. Google’s own guidance for this placement points at broad match and keywordless targeting through Performance Max, Dynamic Search Ads and AI Max for Search, because tightly bound exact-match keyword lists simply cannot map to a generated answer built from a long, multi-part question.

I have a view on this, and it is not the one Google wants you to have. Loosening match types is the correct direction of travel, but doing it without guardrails is a donation. Before you widen anything:

1. Get conversion tracking genuinely clean, because broad match plus Smart Bidding amplifies whatever signal you feed it, including a bad one.
2. Build the negative keyword list first, not after the first wasted month.
3. Widen one campaign, not the account, and hold the rest as your control.

Then read the search terms report weekly rather than monthly. Longer, more conversational queries are the ones an AI Overview triggers on, and they are where both the waste and the genuinely new demand will show up first.

Measurement, and the blind spot you have to plan around

Google Ads does not offer segmented reporting for ads that serve within AI Overviews. There is no column, no segment, no filter. Those impressions and clicks are blended into your normal campaign numbers.

Accept that and build around it instead of waiting for a report that may not arrive this year.

• Use Search Console’s generative AI performance report for the organic side. Launched in June 2026, it shows impressions your pages earned in AI Overviews and AI Mode, split by page, country, device and date. It is organic data, not paid, but it tells you which of your topics Google is answering itself, which is the best proxy available for where your paid clicks are getting harder.
• Watch impression share and average position behaviour on your head terms. Page layout changes show up here before they show up in conversions.
• Track assisted and referral traffic from AI tools separately. We wrote up the GA4 setup in tracking LLM referral traffic, and it is the closest thing to a scoreboard for this shift.
• Judge campaigns on blended CAC over a longer window. If your buyers now arrive better informed and later, a last-click view of a 7-day window will keep telling you a story that stopped being true.

Meanwhile Google keeps building. At Google Marketing Live 2026 it announced Conversational Discovery ads and Highlighted Answers, both Gemini-generated and both carrying a Sponsored label, plus AI-powered Shopping ads and a Business Agent for leads. Those are in testing in the US. They will land here eventually, and the accounts that have already cleaned up their tracking and feed data will be the ones able to use them.

What to do in the next 30 days

Four things, in this order.

1. Check your vertical. If you are in finance, healthcare, gambling or another excluded category, the in-overview placement does not apply to you. Stop worrying about it and spend the hour on your landing pages.
2. Rebaseline your targets. Compare CPC, click-through and conversion rate against the same quarter last year, not against last month. Set expectations with whoever signs off on budget before they notice a trend and panic.
3. Audit your conversion tracking. Everything above depends on the signal being right. Broad match, keywordless targeting and any AI-driven format will multiply a broken setup faster than a manual one ever did.
4. Run one controlled match-type test. One campaign, clean negatives, a fixed reading date, and a decision at the end of it.

Review the picture quarterly. This is moving quickly enough that an annual strategy document will be wrong by the time it is signed off, and fast enough that reacting weekly will just make you chase noise.

Where we can help

Most accounts I look at do not need an AI strategy. They need the tracking fixed, the waste cut and a realistic target set against what the results page looks like now. That is what our free Google Ads audit covers, and it is where I would start before changing a single match type. If you want the ongoing version, our paid search management work is built around exactly this kind of change: test it properly, measure it honestly, move budget to what proves out.

FAQ

Do ads still show when an AI Overview appears?

Yes. Ads are eligible to show above or below the AI Overview in all 200+ markets where AI Overviews run. In 12 countries, including the US, Canada and Australia, text and Shopping ads can also serve inside the overview itself.

Can UK advertisers get ads inside AI Overviews?

Not currently. Google’s list of countries for ads within AI Overviews does not include the United Kingdom. UK ads still serve above and below the overview as normal, so the placement change affects where your ad sits on the page rather than whether it runs at all.

Can I opt out of showing ads in AI Overviews?

No. Google confirms there is no opt-out. Eligible text and Shopping ads from Search, Shopping and Performance Max campaigns can serve there automatically, and there is no separate bid or targeting control for the placement.

Have AI Overviews reduced paid click-through rates?

Paid click-through is lower on queries that trigger an AI Overview than on those that do not, but it has been rising on AI Overview queries while falling on clean ones. Organic click-through has taken the far heavier hit.

Should I switch to broad match because of AI Overviews?

Only with guardrails. Ads in AI Overviews are matched on the overview’s content as well as the query, which favours broader and keywordless targeting. Fix conversion tracking and build your negative list first, then test one campaign rather than converting the whole account.