What Are Google AI Overviews?
An AI Overview is a written summary that Google generates using AI, placed at the top of a search results page, pulling together information from several websites into one direct answer. Instead of showing ten blue links for "best physiotherapist for a bad back near me" or "how much does a private dental check-up cost", Google now often answers the question itself, with links to a small number of sources tucked underneath the summary. The scale of this shift is hard to overstate. AI Overviews reached roughly 1.5 billion monthly users by spring 2025 and had passed 2 billion monthly users by mid-2025, which means most searches your future patients run are now candidates for an AI-written answer rather than a plain results page. Google made its more conversational AI Mode available in Google Search in the UK in mid-2025 too, so this is not a US-only trend a British practice can safely ignore, it is live in UK search results now.
How Many Patients Are Seeing an AI Answer Before They See Your Website?
A growing share, and the direction of travel is clear. Google's more advanced AI Mode, a fuller conversational search experience that goes further than the standard AI Overview, reached about 100 million monthly users across the US and India in 2025, a strong signal that Google intends AI-generated answers to become the default way people search, not a side feature. Pew Research Center's own study of search behaviour confirms what that shift means in practice, finding that Google users are meaningfully less likely to click on any link at all when an AI summary appears in the results. For a practice that has spent years building a website to answer patient questions, this means the audience reading those answers has partly moved. They are still asking the same questions. They are simply getting the answer somewhere else first.
What Happens to Clicks When an AI Overview Appears?
They fall, and the drop is large enough to change how a practice should think about its website. Ahrefs found that the presence of an AI Overview reduces clicks to the page ranking first in the ordinary results by about 58 percent. Separate research reported by Search Engine Land found an even steeper effect in some cases, with Google AI Overviews associated with a 61 percent drop in organic click-through rate and a 68 percent drop in paid click-through rate. Picture a private physiotherapy clinic in Bristol that has ranked first for "sports physio Bristol" for years and built a steady stream of bookings from that position. If Google now answers the underlying question itself, most of the people who used to click through never do, even though the clinic still holds the same ranking it always did. Ranking first stopped guaranteeing the visit it used to guarantee.
Is This Losing You Patients, or Changing Where They Find You?
Both, depending on what you do next. Fortune has described the wider effect on the open web bluntly, reporting that AI Overviews are reducing referral traffic to publisher websites and cutting off the flow of visitors that the web has run on for two decades. That is a real loss for any practice relying on clicks alone as its measure of success. But the patient behind that click has not disappeared. They still have a bad back, a toothache or a question about their diet, and they still need to choose someone to see about it. What has changed is where that choice gets shaped. Increasingly it gets shaped inside the AI answer itself, before a website is ever visited, which means the practices named or described accurately inside that answer keep their share of the decision even as the click declines.
Google AI Overviews vs Traditional SEO: What Should a Practice Prioritise?
Classic SEO still matters, because Google draws its AI Overviews largely from well-structured, trustworthy, well-ranking content, so a practice with a thin, vague website is unlikely to be quoted regardless of how it optimises. But ranking alone is no longer the finish line. The related discipline of answer engine optimisation exists precisely because being named inside the answer has become a separate goal from being listed among the links beneath it, and the two now pull apart from each other in ways a practice needs to plan for rather than assume away. Our fuller comparison of AEO vs SEO sets out exactly where the two overlap and where they diverge, but the short version for a health or wellbeing practice is this. Keep doing the SEO fundamentals, clear pages, accurate information, a fast and usable website, because they remain the raw material an AI Overview draws from. Add to that a deliberate effort to be quotable, since the practices that get cited are the ones whose facts are clear, consistent and easy for an AI system to lift without risk of getting the details wrong.
How Does a Health or Wellbeing Practice Get Cited Inside an AI Overview?
The mechanics are learnable, and none of them require a large budget or a technical team.
Write plain, direct answers to the exact questions patients type, such as how much a first consultation costs, what conditions you treat, and whether you need a referral, with the answer stated near the top of the page rather than buried several paragraphs down. Keep your practice's name, address, opening hours, prices and services identical across your website, your Google Business Profile and any directory you appear in, since an AI system is more confident quoting facts that agree everywhere it looks. Keep genuine patient reviews coming in steadily, because reviews are one of the clearest signals an AI system draws on when it decides which practice to recommend for a given condition or postcode. Use clear headings phrased the way patients ask questions, followed by a short, self-contained answer, the same shape an AI Overview wants to lift and repeat. Be specific rather than vague, since a concrete fact such as "we see most new patients within five working days" is far easier for an AI system to quote confidently than a soft claim like "quick appointments available".
Why Being Easy to Find Matters More Than Ever
There is a well-established idea in marketing that explains why this moment rewards some practices and punishes others, and it has nothing to do with AI. Brands and businesses grow largely by being easy to think of and easy to find at the exact moment someone needs them, built through consistent, recognisable presence repeated across every place a buyer might encounter it, rather than through one clever campaign. An AI Overview is simply a new place where that recognition either exists or does not. A dentist who has spent years keeping their opening hours, prices and reviews accurate and consistent across every channel has, without necessarily realising it, been building exactly the kind of easy-to-find presence that an AI system now rewards with a mention. A dentist whose website is out of date, whose reviews have gone stale and whose details vary from one directory to the next has been building the opposite, and an AI Overview has no reason to guess kindly on their behalf. The practices most likely to be named in the answer are rarely the flashiest. They are the ones that have been the most consistently and accurately present everywhere, for the longest time.
How Do You Measure Whether AI Overviews Are Affecting Your Practice?
Start by accepting that your click numbers alone will no longer tell the whole story, since a steady or even falling click count can sit alongside a healthy flow of new patients who found you through an AI answer and simply called or booked directly. Ask the AI tools your patients are likely to use the same questions they would ask, things like "who is a good private physiotherapist in Leeds" or "how much does a nutrition consultation cost near me", and note whether your practice appears, how accurately it is described, and whether the details are current. Do this monthly rather than once, because the situation is moving quickly. Google is actively pushing users from the simpler AI Overview format towards its fuller AI Mode experience, a shift Press Gazette has reported carries real implications for how much traffic publishers, including small business websites, can expect to receive going forward. Track new-patient enquiries that mention an AI tool by name, keep your Google Business Profile current, and treat the whole area as one you check regularly rather than one you solve once and forget.
