For the past two years, search results have been shifting and traditional organic clicks have steadily declined. When an AI summary takes over the top of the search results page  and pushes your brand out of view, it’s no surprise that your first thought may be: “Just how much traffic is this costing us?”

It’s a valid question, but it’s the wrong one. Our data suggests that focusing on traffic volume alone misses a massive shift in where your market’s money is moving.

Losing traffic isn’t always a loss. 

In the “old” world of search, you often paid (or optimised) for a lot of “noise”: clicks from people who were just looking for a quick definition or a simple fact, who were never going to buy or were just browsing.

How AI Overviews affect the search landscape

AI Overviews change that dynamic completely by handling that 'noisy' first step directly on the search page. Because these summaries satisfy the browsers’ intent, many visitors no longer need to click through to your site. 

From a business perspective, AI Overviews (AIOs) act less like a wall and more like a premium filter. 

AI Overviews as a premium filter

If someone searches "What is a mortgage?", they aren't necessarily ready to buy. They just want a definition. The AI answers that definition on the Google page. The user gets their answer and leaves.

The benefit: Your website doesn't get "cluttered" with low-intent traffic that would have never converted anyway. This is why the study says "losing traffic" isn't a problem—it was "noisy" traffic.

Once users show intent, AIOs act as a value intercept. The intercept happens when the query isn't just a simple definition, but a high-stakes decision and is triggered by searches you would have most likely paid high money for. 

AI Overview as value intercept

If someone searches "Best fixed-rate mortgages for first-time buyers", that is a "value" query. There is a lot of money at stake. The AI doesn't just give a definition; it synthesises advice, compares options, and builds trust.

The benefit: Even if the user doesn't click a link immediately, the financial value of their attention is currently "living" inside that AI box. If your brand is the one the AI is quoting to give that advice, you have "intercepted" that user's trust before they ever reach a website.

While at first this can look like "lost traffic", the reality is that the value hasn't disappeared. Yes, the AI has intercepted the traffic before it ever reaches your site. But that traffic has simply shifted into an on-page conversation that now holds the financial value of that user’s attention.

Consequently, the users who read an AI summary and still decide to click through to your site are no longer just "window shopping". By the time they arrive, they have already passed the initial research phase because they have been primed and educated by the AI. 

They aren't visiting your site to start their investigation; they are visiting to continue it or finish it. This makes them a “pre-qualified” visitor, far more likely to convert than a cold lead who clicked a result without any prior context.

Different objectives with AI Overviews 

In this new reality, the goal isn't getting as many clicks as possible; but rather, getting the right clicks: winning the value intercept. It's about ensuring that when the AI educates your customer, it’s using your brand’s authority to do it. We call this “answer equity”. This is the digital authority you earn when your brand is the definitive source the AI uses to educate the user.

As you might know, in business, authority isn’t just an abstract concept: it has a market price. Every time an AI provides an answer to a high-stakes question, it is occupying premium real estate that brands usually spend millions of dollars to control via advertising and optimisation. If an AI summary is using your brand's information, you are receiving the equivalent of a "premium advertisement" 🤑

Data study across 4 industries

To help marketers understand the scale of this shift, we conducted a data study across 4 key industries: e-commerce, B2B, finance and healthcare. We didn’t just look at search volume; we looked at the replacement cost of that attention to understand what is the dollar cost of the “trust” that currently sits inside those AI answers and  what it would cost to buy that same level of visibility through traditional advertising. 

Report highlights at a glance

Before we dive into the industry-specific data, here’s an executive summary of what’s happening to your search value:

• The study analysed four industries: e-commerce, B2B, finance, and healthcare, to determine the total dollar value of the attention currently sitting inside AI summaries. We found that across just these four sectors, over $12 million in monthly value is being intercepted by AI.
• E-commerce: E-com brands currently have a massive head start with a 36% inclusion rate in AI results. This puts you in the perfect position to capture customers during their research phase before the competition catches up.
• Banking: Banking faces the highest financial stakes with over $7 million in monthly value. AIOs specifically target high-cost, bottom-of-funnel keywords.
• B2B: B2B shows the highest ‘value density’. Nearly 20% of all search value is filtered through AI Overviews, and B2B brands are currently the most successful at winning these citations.
• Healthcare: With 1 in 5 searches triggering an AI overview, the focus for healthcare brands must be on closing the ‘authority gap’ to protect brand reputation.

Quick recap: What are AI Overviews again?

Think of AI Overviews as the search engine's way of doing the heavy lifting for the user. Instead of a list of links, it’s a synthesised answer sitting right at the top of the SERP. For your brand, it means your content (your blogs, your guides, your site) is being plucked and processed to give someone an instant summary. So it's about being the source that the AI trusts to answer the question before the user even clicks.

Key definitions

To understand the risks and opportunities for your business, we need to look beyond simple search volume. Let’s define the key metrics we discuss during this study: 

Banking: The $7 million opportunity

In the banking sector, the way customers find financial information is undergoing a major change. Google is now using AI to answer complex financial questions directly on the search page. For the banking industry, this change affects high-value searches worth $7 million every month. The impact is already significant because the AI is actively managing the most important conversations (such as those about mortgages and loans) where customers are making major financial commitments.

Facts and figures for Banking:

Business analysis: targeting high value intent

For financial services, the impact of AIOs on potential value is massive, disproportionate and frankly, expensive. The headline number is unavoidable: $7,071,032 in monthly CPC value is currently exposed to AI Overviews. But the most interesting insight lies in the gap between volume and value. AI triggers on only 8.1% of search volume, yet it intercepts 12.8% of the total financial value. 

This suggests that AI Overviews in banking are ignoring the low-value “filler” searches. Instead, they are specifically appearing by targeting your most expensive, high-intent keywords. Terms like “best mortgage rates” or “high yield savings”. Because these terms are highly competitive, the AI has positioned itself at the most profitable part of your customer’s journey.

Despite these high stakes, the commercial citation rate is only 28.90%, showing how complicated it is to become the “trusted source”, likely due to the difficulty of getting compliance-heavy financial content ranked in AI.

What this means for your bottom line 

If you’re in banking and not optimising for AI Overviews, you’re potentially leaving money on the table and losing access to your most valuable customers. The gap between massive value exposure ($7M+) and a comparatively lower inclusion rate (28.90%) represents millions in ‘intercepted’ revenue potentially going to competitors.

In this environment, failing to show up in an AI summary is a direct loss of market share. To protect your results, you must ensure your brand’s expertise is the foundation of the AI’s response. Every time a competitor is cited instead of you, they are gaining a high-trust recommendation that would otherwise cost you a significant premium to match through traditional advertising.

Capturing the value by operationalising data scannability

We know that millions of dollars (specifically over $12 million in monthly value across these 4 verticals alone) are being intercepted by AI Overviews.

The data shows that the value is there. This isn't a signal to panic or to lose sleep over lost clicks, but rather a sign to change your strategy slightly. Think of it as a strategic pivot point. The brands that stop viewing AI as a traffic thief and start viewing it as a high-intent value filter are the ones who will succeed in this next era of search.

When you appear in an AI summary, you aren't just getting a link; you are securing a verified recommendation at the exact moment a customer is narrowing their choices.

So, how do you start intercepting that value back? While a full strategy requires a deep dive into your data, here are four immediate levers you can pull right now:

Financial AI Overviews prioritise objective data and comparison. If your data is "locked" in non-scannable formats, your brand is invisible to the recommendation engine.

• Comparison tables should become your best friend. Move interest rates and fee structures into clean tables to help ensure that AI can easily scrape and feature your brand in a ‘best rates’ snapshot. 
• Eliminate content silos by unlocking data from PDFs. Avoid locking critical rate data inside PDF documents or complex calculators that AI cannot easily parse. Instead, keep this information easily scannable for LLMs and search engines on your website as indexable text. 
• Target high-value intents. Focus on keywords with high monetary weight, such as "high yield savings" or "mortgage rates", where AI prioritises objective value over marketing filler.

Our tactic recommendation: Conduct a cross-platform brand sentiment audit

AI in finance targets high-value "money terms" like mortgage rates. If you aren’t visible in the AI summary, you're forced to pay a "penalty tax": buying that same traffic back through incredibly expensive traditional ads.

• Run a brand sentiment audit: Use tools to see how AI models currently perceive your brand. Are you seen as an authority or are there gaps in what the AI knows about you?
• Audit your authority: Check where you are being cited (or missed) across the web, including forums and news sites. AI builds its "trust" in you based on what the whole internet says, not just your website.
• Bridge the content gaps: Once you see where the AI is confused about your services, update your content strategy to specifically address those gaps and cement your status as a credible authority.

Ready to build your roadmap?

Realising the full potential of AI Overviews requires a strategy that goes beyond quick fixes and looks at the bigger picture of your organic performance to ensure your brand maintains its authority as search changes.

At Precis, we help brands navigate these shifts and turn complex data into clear, actionable growth. If you’re looking for support in applying these insights to your business, or just want to discuss future-proofing your strategy, get in touch with our team today. 

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Study methodology: A “value-weighted” approach

This study was conducted based on Ahrefs data from websites covering large volumes within each industry in the Swedish market, ensuring the inclusion of as many keywords as possible within each sector. We also included non-market-leading Precis clients to establish a more reliable benchmark; by avoiding a sole focus on top-performing websites, we prevented skewing the efficiency rate of inclusion in AI Overviews (AIO). This approach accounts for the assumption that more authoritative websites may naturally achieve a higher efficiency rate of citation.

1. Data collection and diagnostic tools

The research was conducted using Ahrefs as the primary diagnostic tool to extract keyword performance and SERP feature data for the Swedish market.

• Regional targeting: Data was pulled for queries where the location in Ahrefs was set to Sweden, reflecting local search behaviour and market-specific search results.
• Sector segmentation: Keywords were aggregated into four primary industry verticals (B2B, healthcare, banking, and e-commerce) to identify sector-specific risks and opportunities.
• Data freshness: Search volumes are monthly averages, while keyword positioning and AIO presence reflect the status at the time of the crawl. CPC represents the estimated bid in US dollars for a given keyword in Google Ads. Because advertisers can raise or lower their bids at any time, these figures are treated as averages; they reflect the last registered CPC data in Ahrefs at the time of the study, as Ahrefs does not update this specific metric frequently.

2. Core definitions and value metrics

We established proprietary metrics to quantify the "value intercept" of AI Overviews.

• Valuable volume: Calculated as (monthly search volume × CPC). This acts as a proxy for commercial intent; a high search volume multiplied by a high CPC identifies keywords with higher business activity and most probably a higher turnover.
• AIO share of value: The percentage of an industry’s total "Valuable Volume" that is currently exposed to an AI Overview = AIO Market Value / Valuable Volume.
• AIO market value: The amount of valuable volume where AI Overviews are showing up in search results.
• Commercial citation rate: The share of AIO market value where the tracked websites are showing up inside the AI Overviews.