How AI Overviews Are Reshaping Paid Search in 2026

What Are AI Overviews Actually Doing to Your Paid Search Results?

To understand the impact, it helps to compare what the search results page looked like in 2024 versus what it looks like in 2026.

In 2024, a typical Google search for something like “best CRM for small business” would show three or four paid ads at the top, followed by organic results. Your ad had a clear shot at being the first thing a user saw. Even if they didn't click on the first ad, the second or third had strong visibility.

In 2026, that same query now triggers an AI Overview — a multi-paragraph summary that synthesizes information from multiple sources, often with inline citations and expandable follow-up questions. This block can take up the entire visible screen on mobile devices and a significant portion on desktop. Your paid ads? They're below it. Sometimes well below it.

The practical effect is that users who would have clicked on your ad now get their answer from the AI Overview and leave the page. This is the zero-click search reality applied directly to your paid media budget. You're still paying for impressions in some cases, but the clicks — and the customers — aren't coming through.

Not all queries are affected equally. Here is how the impact breaks down by query type:

The pattern is clear: the more informational the query, the more likely an AI Overview will intercept it. The more transactional or local the query, the safer your ads are. This distinction is the foundation of every strategy adjustment that follows.

Which Small Business Queries Are Most at Risk — and Which Are Safe?

Understanding which of your keywords are vulnerable to AI Overviews is the first step toward protecting your ad spend. Let's break this down into actionable categories.

High-Risk Queries (Reduce or Eliminate)

These are the queries where AI Overviews are most likely to appear and most likely to steal your clicks:

• “How to” queries — “How to fix a leaky faucet,” “How to file a business tax extension.” Google's AI answers these directly.
• Broad comparison queries — “Best accounting software for small business,” “Top marketing agencies.” AI Overviews now generate comparison tables that satisfy the user's intent.
• Definition and explanation queries — “What is SEO,” “What does a digital marketing agency do.” These are answered comprehensively by the AI Overview with no reason for the user to click further.

If you are bidding on keywords in these categories, check whether your click-through rates have declined over the past six months. If they have, AI Overviews are likely the cause.

Lower-Risk Queries (Maintain or Increase)

These queries remain strong performers because Google has a financial incentive to keep ads visible for commercial intent:

• Transactional queries — “Hire HVAC contractor Fort Wayne,” “Buy office furniture online,” “Schedule dental cleaning.” Users are ready to act, and Google keeps ads front and center.
• “Near me” queries — “Plumber near me,” “Marketing agency near me.” These trigger the Maps pack and local service ads, which remain above or alongside AI Overviews.
• Brand queries — Searches for your specific business name or branded terms. AI Overviews rarely appear for navigational queries where the user already knows what they want.

The Audit You Should Run Today

Open your Google Ads account and pull the Search Terms report for the past 90 days. Sort by click-through rate and look for keywords where CTR has dropped while impressions stayed flat or increased. This pattern — more impressions, fewer clicks — is the signature of an AI Overview intercepting your traffic. Flag those keywords for budget reduction or removal.

Then, manually search your top 20 keywords in Google. Note which ones trigger an AI Overview. This takes 15 minutes and gives you a direct view of what your customers are seeing when they search for your services.

How Should You Adapt Your Paid Search Strategy for the AI Overview Era?

Once you know which queries are affected, the next step is restructuring your campaigns. Here are five specific adjustments that work for small business advertisers in 2026.

1. Shift Budget Toward High-Intent Transactional Keywords

This is the most impactful change you can make. Take the budget you're currently spending on informational and comparison keywords — the ones being eaten by AI Overviews — and reallocate it to transactional keywords with clear purchase or hiring intent.

For example, instead of bidding on “best ways to improve home energy efficiency,” bid on “HVAC installation quote Fort Wayne.” The first query will be answered by an AI Overview. The second will show your ad prominently because Google knows the user is ready to spend money.

Yes, transactional keywords often have higher cost-per-click. But the conversion rate is dramatically higher, which means your cost per actual customer acquired often goes down even as your CPC goes up.

2. Update Your Negative Keyword Strategy

Negative keywords have always been important, but in the AI Overview era they serve a new purpose: preventing your ads from appearing on queries where an AI Overview will intercept the click anyway. Add negative keywords for common informational modifiers like “how to,” “what is,” “definition,” “guide,” and “tutorial” to your campaigns.

This is an evolution of the negative keyword approach we covered in our guide to rethinking Google Ads targeting strategy. The principle is the same — stop paying for clicks that won't convert — but the reason has changed. It's no longer just about irrelevant queries; it's about queries where AI Overviews have made your ad invisible.

3. Maximize Ad Extensions

When your ad does appear below an AI Overview, it needs to work harder to earn the click. Ad extensions — sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, call extensions, location extensions — make your ad larger and more compelling. A fully extended ad takes up significantly more screen real estate than a bare-bones text ad, which helps it compete for attention even when it's not in the traditional top position.

In our experience, ads with four or more active extensions see 15–25% higher click-through rates than ads with one or two. This was important before AI Overviews; it's critical now.

4. Test Performance Max Campaigns

Performance Max campaigns distribute your ads across Google's entire ecosystem — Search, YouTube, Display, Gmail, Maps, and Discover. This matters because AI Overviews only affect the Search results page. Your ads on YouTube, in Gmail, or on the Display Network are completely unaffected by AI Overviews.

By diversifying your ad placement through Performance Max, you reduce your dependence on the Search results page where AI Overviews are most disruptive. This doesn't mean abandoning Search campaigns entirely — it means ensuring your entire advertising strategy isn't concentrated in the one channel most affected by this change.

5. Build a Remarketing Engine

Remarketing becomes more valuable when AI Overviews reduce your initial click volume. Here's why: even if a user reads an AI Overview and doesn't click your ad on the first search, they may still visit your website later through an organic result, a direct visit, or a different search. Once they're on your site, your remarketing pixel captures them, and you can serve them ads across Google's network for a fraction of the cost of a cold search click.

Remarketing lets you recapture the audience that AI Overviews are diverting from your initial search ads. It's not a replacement for search advertising, but it's a powerful complement in a world where first-click search volume is declining for many query types.

What Role Does AEO Play in Your Paid Search Strategy?

If AI Overviews are answering informational queries before users reach your ads, the logical question is: can you get your brand into those AI Overviews instead? That's where Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) comes in.

AEO is the practice of structuring your website content so that AI systems — Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and others — cite or reference your content in their generated answers. We covered this in depth in our Answer Engine Optimization guide, but here is how it connects specifically to paid search.

The two-pronged approach works like this: for informational queries where AI Overviews dominate, invest in AEO to get your brand cited in the AI-generated answer. For transactional queries where AI Overviews are absent, invest in paid search to capture the click directly. This way, your brand appears in front of users regardless of which type of query they use.

Think of it as a division of labor. AEO handles the top of the funnel — awareness, education, and brand visibility during the research phase. Paid search handles the bottom of the funnel — capturing high-intent users who are ready to buy, hire, or schedule. Together, they cover the full customer journey in a way that neither strategy can achieve alone.

If you want to understand the broader context of how AI is reshaping organic traffic, our analysis of where website traffic has gone in 2026 explains the full picture. The paid search implications are a subset of a much larger shift in how people find and consume information online.

The Honest Take: AI Overviews Are Changing Paid Search, Not Killing It

Paid search is not dead. Google makes the vast majority of its revenue from advertising. They are not going to build a product that destroys their own business model. AI Overviews are designed to improve the user experience on informational queries while preserving — and in some cases enhancing — ad visibility on commercial queries.

Your cost-per-click may increase. As more advertisers shift budget toward the transactional keywords that remain unaffected by AI Overviews, competition for those keywords will intensify. This is already happening in competitive verticals. The advertisers who win will be the ones with better landing pages, stronger conversion tracking, and more efficient campaigns — not just the ones with the biggest budgets.

Click volume on informational queries is declining. This is real and measurable. If your campaigns depend heavily on informational keywords, you will see reduced performance. The solution is not to fight the trend but to reallocate to where clicks are still flowing.

Small businesses are not inherently disadvantaged. In fact, the shift toward precision over volume can benefit smaller advertisers. A focused $2,000 monthly budget targeting 15 high-intent keywords with no AI Overview competition can outperform a $10,000 budget spread across 200 keywords where half are being intercepted by AI Overviews.

The advertisers who adapt early will have a structural advantage. Campaign optimization data compounds over time. If you restructure your campaigns now, you'll have months of performance data by the time your competitors realize they need to change. That data — which keywords convert, which ad extensions perform, which audiences respond — gives you an edge that money alone cannot buy.

How Should Fort Wayne and Northeast Indiana Advertisers Respond?

For small businesses in Fort Wayne and Northeast Indiana spending $1,000 to $5,000 a month on Google Ads, the AI Overview shift creates both risk and opportunity. At typical local budget levels, wasted spend is magnified — if 30% of your keywords are now being intercepted by AI Overviews, a business spending $2,500 a month could be losing roughly $750 per month on clicks that never come. Over a year, that's $9,000 in wasted ad spend.

Here are three specific recommendations for Fort Wayne and Northeast Indiana advertisers:

1. Audit your keyword portfolio against AI Overviews this week. Pull your Search Terms report, identify which keywords trigger AI Overviews, and calculate how much budget is flowing to those queries. This is not a hypothetical exercise — it's a direct path to finding money you can reallocate to better-performing keywords. Our Google Ads budget waste diagnosis walks through the full audit process.

2. Double down on local, high-intent keywords. Fort Wayne's market size is an advantage here. Hyper-local transactional queries like “emergency plumber Fort Wayne,” “dental implants Allen County,” or “commercial HVAC contractor Northeast Indiana” are unlikely to trigger AI Overviews and have clear purchase intent. These keywords may cost more per click, but they convert at dramatically higher rates.

3. Combine paid search with AEO and organic strategy. Don't try to solve the AI Overview problem with paid search alone. Build an integrated strategy where AEO captures your brand's visibility in AI-generated answers, organic SEO maintains your presence in traditional search results, and paid search targets the transactional queries where ads still dominate. Our Google Ads targeting strategy guide covers the paid component; the other pieces are equally important.

Ready to Audit Your Google Ads for AI Overview Exposure?

AI Overviews are not going away. Google is expanding them, and the queries they affect will only grow in 2026 and beyond. The small business advertisers who adapt now — by auditing their keywords, shifting budget toward high-intent queries, and building a complementary AEO strategy — will be the ones who maintain profitable paid search campaigns.

If you're not sure where your Google Ads budget is going or how much of it is being wasted on AI Overview-affected queries, we can help. Get a free Google Ads audit that includes an AI Overview exposure analysis, or reach out directly to discuss your specific situation.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources

1. Neil Patel: “Are AI Overviews Stealing Your Clicks?”