Why Your Practice Might Need to Worry About AI Overviews

Where your clients’ questions go now

Google launched AI Overviews, the AI-written summary at the top of many search results, at its developer conference in 2024. A year later, on May 20, 2025, it began rolling out AI Mode, which Google describes as an end-to-end AI search experience with follow-up questions, across the U.S. with no sign-up required.⁠^[1] In a post first published June 3, 2026, and updated August 31, Google gave the current scale:

AI Overviews now has over 2.5 billion monthly active users, while AI Mode has surpassed one billion monthly users.

Source [2]

Outside Google, the same shift shows up. A Pew Research Center survey of 5,119 U.S. adults, conducted in February 2026, found that about half now use AI chatbots, that 44% use ChatGPT (up from 34% a year earlier), and that about four in ten use chatbots to search for information.⁠^[4] OpenAI said at its developer conference on September 29, 2026, that ChatGPT has 1.2 billion weekly users.⁠^[5]

None of this means people have stopped searching. It means a growing share of the questions that used to end in a list of ten links now end in a written answer, and the answer decides which names the person hears first.

What happens to the click

The best independent measurement we know of comes from Pew. Researchers analyzed the actual browsing of 900 U.S. adults during March 2025, covering 68,879 Google searches.⁠^[3] What they found:

• When a search page showed an AI summary, users clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits. Without a summary, it was 15%.⁠^[3]
• Users clicked a link inside the AI summary itself in just 1% of visits to pages that had one.⁠^[3]
• People were more likely to end their browsing session entirely after a page with a summary: 26% versus 16%.⁠^[3]
• About one in five searches (18%) produced a summary at the time, and 88% of those summaries cited three or more sources.⁠^[3]

Commercial data points the same way. Seer Interactive, a search marketing agency, tracks informational queries for its clients (3,119 search terms across 42 organizations from June 2024 through September 2025). For the third quarter of 2025, it reported an organic click-through rate of 0.70% on queries where an AI Overview appeared and cited the client’s brand, versus 0.52% where an Overview appeared without citing it.⁠^[6] Seer is careful to say it cannot prove that being cited causes the difference: brands that already have more authority may simply be cited more often.⁠^[6] That caveat is worth keeping. These are averages from one agency’s client base, not a law of nature.

Google’s view is different in emphasis. It says that when people click from results pages with AI Overviews, those clicks are “higher quality,” meaning visitors are more likely to spend more time on the site.⁠^[7] Both things can be true at once: fewer clicks, from people who already know more about what they want.

Being named is becoming its own battle

Here is the part that matters for a practice. The questions people ask a lawyer, an adviser, or an accountant before they ever call one tend to be long and shaped like questions. Those are exactly the searches Pew found most likely to produce an AI summary: 60% of searches beginning with words like “who,” “what,” “when,” or “why” produced one, and 53% of searches ten words or longer did, compared with 8% of one- or two-word searches.⁠^[3]

In those answers, the ranking is not a list you can scroll. A handful of sources and names are woven into a paragraph. Google describes how it builds them: its AI features rely on its core search ranking systems to retrieve relevant pages from its index, and may issue several related searches at once (it calls this “query fan-out”) to assemble a response with supporting links.⁠^[8] Where appropriate, those responses can include information about local businesses.⁠^[8]

That changes what visibility means. Two things now matter alongside your ranking: whether you are named, and whether what is said about you is accurate. An AI answer that describes your practice areas wrongly, or pulls an old address, is a problem a ranking report will never show you.

What Google says actually works, and what doesn’t

Google has published unusually direct guidance on this, and it is a useful corrective to a lot of what is being sold. Its baseline: to appear as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, a page must be indexed and eligible to show in Google Search with a snippet, and there are “no additional technical requirements.”⁠^[7]

Worth doing

• Write what Google calls “non-commodity” content: material that reflects real expertise and a point of view, rather than restating common knowledge that anyone, or any AI model, could produce.⁠^[8]
• Keep your Google Business Profile information up to date. Google names it specifically.⁠^[7]
• Make sure important information is available as text on the page, and that any structured data matches the visible text.⁠^[7]
• Make your pages easy to reach through internal links, and let search engines crawl them.⁠^[7]

Not worth paying for

Google’s guide has a section titled “Mythbusting generative AI search: what you don’t need to do.” For Google Search, it says you can ignore:⁠^[8]

• creating llms.txt files or other special “AI” markup, because Google Search doesn’t use them;
• “chunking” your content into small pieces for AI to digest;
• rewriting your content in a special style just for AI systems;
• chasing inauthentic “mentions” around the web; and
• special schema markup. Structured data still helps with rich results, but there is no AI-specific kind.

If someone offers to make your practice “AI-optimized” mainly through items on that list, you now have Google’s own documentation to hand back to them.

What a practice can do this month

1. 01Ask the questions yourself. Type in the questions a new client would actually ask, the way they would ask them, in Google, in AI Mode, and in ChatGPT. Note whether your practice is named and whether what is said is right. Answers change from run to run, so treat this as a snapshot, and repeat it every few months.
2. 02Fix the facts at the source. Correct your Business Profile, your own website, and any directory listings you control, so the information AI systems draw on is consistent.
3. 03Answer real questions in plain text. A clear page that answers what clients actually ask you, written by someone who knows, is the closest thing to a strategy Google endorses.
4. 04Measure it. Google Search Console now has a Generative AI performance report that shows how your pages appear in these features, including impressions.⁠^[2]⁠^[8]

Should you opt out?

Google now lets any site choose, in Search Console, whether its content can appear in AI Overviews, AI Mode, and AI features in Discover. It rolled that control out to all websites worldwide as of August 31, 2026.⁠^[9] Excluding your site means your links and content won’t appear in those features and you won’t receive traffic or impressions from them; Google says the setting isn’t used as a ranking signal elsewhere in Search, and that it doesn’t govern AI training, which has a separate control.⁠^[9] A publisher whose business is the page view might have reasons to opt out. A practice that wants new clients to find it will usually want to stay in.

A word on professional rules

Whatever you publish to be found, your profession’s rules still apply to it. New York’s Rules of Professional Conduct define an “advertisement” as a communication by or on behalf of a lawyer or law firm about its services whose primary purpose is getting retained, and they list web sites among “computer-accessed communications.”⁠^[11] For an investment adviser, marketing content can fall under the SEC’s Marketing Rule, which the SEC has already enforced against advisers that overstated their use of AI.⁠^[10] Content that wins an AI mention by stretching the truth is a liability, not an asset.

Where we fit, honestly

Long Island AI builds private AI assistants for practices. We don’t sell search campaigns, so take this as an observation from people who watch AI closely, not a pitch. Two things connect it to what we do.

First, when an AI answer does send someone your way, they often arrive already knowing what they want, and the first practice to respond well tends to get the conversation. An assistant that answers the phone after hours and drafts the follow-up is built for that moment. That is the work described in your AI team member on our homepage.

Second, the same clients who are asking chatbots questions are wary of them. In Pew’s 2026 survey, majorities of Americans said AI is advancing too quickly and will put their personal information at risk.⁠^[4] That is a reason to be careful about where your own AI sends client information, which is the subject of the difference section of our homepage.