There’s a specific kind of anxiety that comes with watching your Google Ads metrics slowly shift without any obvious explanation. Your campaigns haven’t changed. Your budget is the same. But something feels off — impressions are drifting, click-through rates are quietly softening, and you can’t quite put your finger on why.

For a growing number of e-commerce businesses, the answer is sitting right at the top of the search results page: AI Overviews.

What AI Overviews Actually Are

AI Overviews are Google’s AI-generated summaries that appear before everything else on the results page. They pull together information from multiple sources and present it as a direct answer — no clicking required. You’ve probably seen them. They show up as a light blue box at the very top, often followed by source links, and then (somewhere further down) the actual paid ads and organic results.

Google rolled these out broadly in mid-2024 after years of testing, and according to an Adthena analysis of 21 million search results, they now appear on roughly 15% of all searches. That might sound modest, but the distribution matters enormously — and it’s heavily skewed towards the types of queries that affect your visibility.

The Visibility Problem

The core issue is simple: AI Overviews take up space. Real estate. Pixels. Whatever you want to call it — they push everything below them further down the page.

On a desktop browser, ads traditionally appeared at the top of the page and were immediately visible. Now, on queries where an AI Overview appears, those same ads can end up below the fold. A user has to scroll to see them. And most users don’t.

This is why you might be seeing impression counts hold relatively steady while click-through rates slip. The ads are technically being shown — they’re just no longer in the prime position where people actually look.

The Nuance That Most Analyses Miss

Here’s the thing that often gets lost in the doom-and-gloom coverage: AI Overviews don’t appear equally across all query types. They skew heavily towards informational searches — "how do I choose a leather wallet," "what size rug for a living room," "difference between matte and gloss tiles."

Product-intent searches — the ones where someone is actively ready to buy — still surface Shopping ads and paid results prominently. If someone searches "buy leather wallet brown medium," Google knows that’s a transactional query and serves products accordingly. The shopping carousel, the paid listings — they’re still front and centre.

This distinction is important because it changes where you should focus your attention. If your impression share is declining on broad informational queries, that might actually be fine. Those clicks were often the least commercially valuable anyway. The more important question is: what’s happening on your high-intent product searches?

Why the Clicks You Get Now Are Worth More

There’s a counterintuitive upside here that’s worth taking seriously.

When AI Overviews absorb the casual browsers — the people who just wanted a quick answer and weren’t going to buy anything today — the clicks that do make it through to your ads tend to be more intentional. Someone who scrolls past an AI Overview and still clicks a paid result is demonstrating more commercial intent than average.

This means click-through rate volume might drop, but click quality can improve. Conversion rates often hold up better than expected when you look at the data carefully. If you’re measuring success purely on CTR, the picture looks worse than it actually is. Look at your conversion rates and revenue-per-click alongside CTR before drawing any conclusions.

What This Actually Means for Your Campaigns

The practical implications pull in a few directions:

Protect your Shopping campaign quality. Shopping ads — the product listing ads with images, prices, and product names — appear in the Shopping carousel, which is a separate placement from text ads. On product-intent searches, this carousel still appears prominently, often before AI Overviews. Your Shopping campaigns are your most defensible ad real estate right now.

Your product feed quality has become more important, not less. Google’s algorithm decides which products to show in the Shopping carousel based partly on how well your feed matches the query. A well-structured feed with accurate titles, complete attributes, and correct categories gives you the best chance of showing up where the AI Overview doesn’t crowd you out.

Don’t chase impression share on informational queries. If your Search Impression Share metric is declining, check which query types are driving that decline. Losing impression share on "what is the best type of rug for high traffic areas" is not worth losing sleep over. Losing it on "buy wool rug 160x230cm" is worth investigating.

Review your search terms report. If AI Overviews are handling informational queries, and you’re showing for those queries anyway through broad match keywords, you may be spending budget on traffic that was never going to convert well. This is a good moment to tighten keyword targeting and add negatives around purely informational terms.

The Practical Action

Pull your search terms report for the last 30 days. Filter for the queries with the highest impressions and lowest conversion rates. Ask yourself honestly: would an AI Overview have done a better job of answering this query than a product page? If yes, add it as a negative and redirect that budget towards the searches where you actually win.

AI Overviews aren’t going away, and they’ll likely expand. The businesses that adapt are the ones that lean into transactional intent, invest in Shopping feed quality, and stop measuring success purely on impression share.

If your Shopping campaigns aren’t performing as well as they should be, take a look at how Roksys approaches Shopping campaign management — feed quality and campaign structure are where most of the gains are found.