How Google’s AI Overviews are changing the game for PPC and Google Ads

Google’s introduction of AI Overviews (formerly Search Generative Experience or SGE) is radically reshaping the search landscape. For advertisers, the shift has serious implications: less visibility, fewer clicks, and more uncertainty. With the rise of generative search, both paid and organic placements are increasingly pushed down the page, disrupting PPC strategies.

At Adthena, we’ve conducted a data study to understand the true impact of these changes across five core verticals: Retail, Travel, Finance, Healthcare, and Automotive. Combined with customer insights and real search results data, this blog outlines what advertisers need to know and how they can adapt.

AI Overviews (AIOs) are Google’s new generative responses to search queries. They appear prominently on the SERP, often at the very top, summarizing answers using a blend of AI-generated content and web citations. These responses differ from traditional features like Featured Snippets or Knowledge Graph panels:

• Featured Snippets pull directly from a single source
• Knowledge Graph answers rely on structured data
• AI Overviews synthesize multiple sources in real-time

Their position on the page makes them powerful, but also disruptive. Ads and organic listings are often pushed below the fold, forcing advertisers to rethink how they maintain brand visibility.

As AI Overviews dominate the SERP, traditional ad placements are being crowded out, which means:

• Fewer ad slots sitting above the fold
• Organic results remain visible but can lose attention and clicks
• Fragmented user journeys

Click-through rates and ad engagement drop

As AI Overviews capture more user attention, fewer users scroll to traditional ad placements, leading to:

• Lower CTRs for key terms
• Lower Quality Scores over time

Cost-per-click and competitive pressure

The scarcity of premium placements is likely to lead to increased bidding activity:

• Higher CPCs to secure visibility
• Volatility in auction performance

Some verticals are seeing more dramatic changes to their SERP landscape than others. Here’s a breakdown based on our data:

Retail

• Shopping ads are frequently pushed below AI-generated content, reducing above-the-fold visibility.
• Achieving dual presence in both ads and SEO is still possible, but dominating the SERP is now far more difficult.

Travel

• Planning and advice queries often trigger AIOs, showing in addition to both ads and organic content.
• Longer-tail queries like “best family holidays in Greece” now surface AI content first.

Finance

• AI Overviews are cautiously emerging in Finance, driven entirely by generic, informational, and top-funnel queries.
• No branded terms triggered AIOs, indicating brand searches remain largely unaffected, for now.

Healthcare

• AI Overviews dominate informational searches like “what is [drug name] used for?”

Automotive

• AI-generated car comparison content is shifting the buyer journey higher up the SERP.

To understand the real impact of Google’s AI Overviews (AIOs), Adthena’s data science team analyzed over 10.4 million SERPs across a five day period. This snapshot reveals how AIOs are shaping search results in key global markets, including the US, UK, AU and the EU.

We examined 450,000 search terms from 25 global enterprise brands across five key industries: Retail, Travel, Finance, Healthcare, and Automotive.

Our goal was to uncover:

• How often AI Overviews (AIOs) are triggered
• What types of queries are most likely to prompt them
• And whether AIOs appear more frequently on branded or generic searches

This chart breaks down search queries by industry and query length, showing the percentage that trigger an AI Overview (green) versus those that don’t (blue).

What stands out is a clear pattern: the longer the search term, the more likely it is to trigger an AI overview—almost a linear trend.

For example, Retail and Travel rarely see AI overviews unless the term is fairly long. Meanwhile, Healthcare is already highly saturated with AI overviews across term length, even for short search terms.

This heatmap shows how often AI overviews appear across various industries, based on the length of the search query. It breaks down the percentage of searches that trigger an AI overview depending on how many words are in the search term.

For example, longer search queries tend to trigger AIOs more frequently, especially in industries like Healthcare where even shorter queries often generate these summaries.

The data shows that:

• Across all industries, longer-tail queries tend to trigger AIOs more often
• While this is true across all industries, retail sees the highest frequency of AIOs on the longest terms
• Healthcare stands out with higher AIO presence across various query lengths

Looking at AIO frequency by industry, we note:

• Healthcare leads with AI overviews appearing nearly 50% of the time.
• Financial Services follows at 29.2%, followed by Automotive at 15.8%.
• Retail and Travel have the fewest AIOs, at 7.8% and 4.6% respectively.
  

This shows that some industries, especially Healthcare, are seeing AI-generated answers much more often and earlier than others.

Looking at AIOs Brand vs. Generic term split, we note:

• In Financial Services, 29.2% of generic searches show AI overviews, but none appear on brand searches.
• In Retail and Travel, AIOs only show up on generic searches, not on brand terms.
• Healthcare is different: It has the highest AIO presence overall, with 39.6% of brand searches also showing AI summaries, the highest of any industry.

This means Healthcare faces a unique challenge: even branded searches are getting AI-generated summaries, which could affect how brands control their message and accuracy in search results.

With the rapid rise of AI Overviews and other evolving SERP formats, advertisers need visibility into how Google’s results pages are actually changing in their category.

Adthena’s Search Landscape dashboard gives you a live, tailored view of how the SERP is shifting in your specific market. Whether it’s AI Overviews, Product Listings, Hotel Packs, or Flight Ads, you can see which features are becoming more prominent and which are disappearing, across your critical search terms and competitors.

As it’s fully personalized to your business, you’ll see what matters most in your category:

• A travel brand may notice flight and hotel features overtaking paid ads
• A retailer can track when product listings are displaced by generative summaries
• A pharma advertiser can pinpoint when symptom-related queries trigger AIOs

The context behind your campaigns

As SERPs become more dynamic, marketers are under pressure to justify performance shifts and explain traffic drops. But without insight into what’s happening above or around your ad, optimization becomes guesswork.

The Search Landscape dashboard enables you to:

• Identify which SERP formats are becoming more or less frequent
• Understand changes in visibility across paid and organic placements
• Track shifts in SERP dominance for you and your competitors
• Tie these trends directly to fluctuations in your performance metrics

It’s the missing context marketers need to stay ahead of Google’s constant changes and protect campaign efficiency in an AI-dominated landscape.

Whether you’re seeing your paid ads buried or new competitors climbing through generative answers, Search Landscape helps you navigate the chaos with confidence.

To stay visible and competitive, marketers should:

• Optimize for visibility in unaffected or long-tail queries
• Segment brand vs product terms to detect where AIOs are disrupting performance
• Use tools like Adthena’s Search Landscape to track SERP changes and identify emerging opportunities

AI Overviews are changing the rules of engagement in paid and organic search. Visibility is harder to win, competitive intelligence is more vital than ever, and strategic agility is the key to surviving the AI shake-up.

With Adthena’s Search Landscape dashboard, you can monitor weekly SERP shifts, detect AI Overview disruption, and benchmark competitors’ visibility.

Book a demo to see your search visibility across the evolving SERP and discover how to protect your paid search investments.