If you have noticed your organic traffic numbers shifting lately, you are certainly not alone. 

While the industry often talks about a “search apocalypse”, we think there is a much more exciting story unfolding just beneath the surface. We are moving away from the era of chasing every single click and entering a time where search acts as a ✨premium filter✨ for your brand. This is a chance to rise above the noise and clutter and focus on being the most helpful and trusted voice in your space.

In this episode of Connecting the dots, I sat down with Kristina Bergwall, our SEO Director at Precis, who has spent fourteen (14!!) years guiding brands through the evolution of search. Kristina’s team recently conducted an extensive study into how AI Overviews are reshaping website traffic across the E-commerce, Banking, B2B and Healthcare sectors. By analysing 12 million USD of monthly search value, they discovered that value is not disappearing but is being redirected into a new kind of digital endorsement.

Here is a recap and debrief of our conversation and how you can embrace this change to ensure your brand remains the definitive source of truth in an AI driven world.

The “value intercept” as a premium filter

It is very common to feel a sense of uncertainty when traffic numbers change, but Kristina suggests we view this shift through a much more positive lens. Often, these changes mean that AI is simply assisting your audience by answering their broader, initial questions directly on the search page.

This is the value intercept. It is a brilliant opportunity to let AI manage those busy first steps of a search journey. This ensures that when people do reach your site, they are more informed and ready to engage (read: further down the funnel, closer to purchase). By providing the insights that AI uses to answer a query, you are connecting with your audience at their most influential moment. A brand can have a massive impact without needing a traditional click, simply by being the trusted source of the answer.

The 3 pillars of “answer equity”

How can you help AI discover and share your brand expertise? Kristina breaks this down into three helpful strategic pillars.

1. Scannability (a technical bridge): There is a wonderful opportunity to be cited if you make your expertise easy for models to find. True scannability relies on technical bridges like schema markup and comparison tables. These tools allow models to parse your data instantly (whether it’s a B2B feature grid or an E-commerce product specification) and highlight your brand as a primary recommendation.
2. Authority (a trust advantage): The new search landscape prioritises brands that clearly demonstrate their expertise. Trust signals help your brand be recognised as a reliable source, from expert "Tested & Verified" badges in E-commerce and financial accreditations in Banking, to author credentials like a PhD or a "reviewed by" date in Healthcare. Kristina explains that AI Overviews act as a premium filter, specifically seeking out the most credible sources to share with users.‍
3. Intent (a portable language): To embrace this new era, you must speak the language of your audience. Reworking academic titles into the actual questions people ask makes your content perfectly portable for AI summaries. Following these headers, such as "Which mortgage is right for me?" or "Best running shoes for flat feet", with a direct one or two-sentence answer makes it effortless for AI to cite you as the definitive source.

The commercial win of the long run

From a commercial perspective, this shift offers a unique way to optimise your marketing efficiency. Our research identified a 12 million dollar pool of monthly value currently sitting in AI Overviews, which acts as a helpful benchmark for what we call replacement cost. You can use this figure to justify strategic investments in your digital infrastructure, framing search as a durable asset for your balance sheet rather than a recurring expense. By being the source the AI recommends, you can reallocate your media budget to focus on high intent conversion while the AI handles the educational heavy lifting. This moves your brand from the cycle of paying for every interaction to owning a permanent piece of your market’s trust.

The industry data: where is the value shifting?

Kristina’s strategic pillars aren't just theoretical, they are the direct result of our deep dive into the four industries currently feeling the greatest impact from AI Overviews. While the "search apocalypse" narrative suggests value is disappearing, our data shows it is actually concentrating in specific ways depending on your sector.

To help you move from theory to execution, we’ve broken down the "Value Intercept" across the four core pillars of our study:

E-commerce: the calm before the storm

While AI has yet to fully target "buy now" transactional keywords, e-commerce is currently in a strategic "window of opportunity." Currently, AI Overviews appear for a modest 2.3% of search volume, but the citation rate for brands is a healthy 35%. This suggests that Google is using this period to refine how it helps shoppers "do their homework" before they hit the purchase button. This is the calm before the storm. By optimizing your product feeds with rich data points and building "how-to-choose" guides now, you can train the AI to recognize your products as the primary recommendation. Winning the research phase today ensures you are the first choice when Google rolls out more advanced, agentic shopping features.

Prepare for the e-commerce AI storm

Healthcare: closing the authority gap

In an industry built entirely on trust and clinical safety, the rise of AI Overviews has created a significant "authority gap." Our study found that while 1 in 5 healthcare searches now trigger an AI answer, trusted brands are being cited only about 33% of the time. This means for nearly 67% of medical queries, non-clinical or general sources are leading the narrative. With roughly $4.5 million in monthly market value currently being filtered through AI summaries, healthcare leaders have a massive opportunity to reclaim their status as the "first opinion" patients encounter. By reworking academic jargon into patient-led questions and doubling down on expert EEAT signals, you can ensure your brand—not a forum—is the definitive voice providing medical advice.

‍Read our full healthcare insights here

B2B: capturing high value density

B2B search exhibits the highest "value density" of any industry we analysed. While AI Overviews appear for only 12% of search volume, they intercept over 17% of the total financial value—proving that AI is specifically targeting the high-stakes "solution-aware" phase where professionals evaluate vendors. In this landscape, being invisible in the AI summary means being absent from the executive shortlist. The good news? B2B content is naturally suited for AI, with a market-leading citation rate of nearly 42%. To secure your category authority, you must ungate high-value technical specs and simplify your language so AI models can easily parse your solutions as the logical answer to a buyer’s problem.

Discover how to reclaim your B2B market value

Banking and finance: the $7 million search war

For financial services, the stakes of the AI transition are unavoidable: over $7 million in monthly search value is currently exposed to AI Overviews. Interestingly, AI in banking targets expensive "money terms"—like mortgage rates and high-yield savings—at a rate disproportionate to their search volume. Despite these high stakes, the commercial citation rate is only 28.9%, likely due to the complexity of making compliance-heavy content scannable for LLMs. If you aren't visible in these summaries, you are effectively paying a "penalty tax" by being forced to buy that same high-intent traffic back through increasingly expensive traditional ads. Success here requires operationalising your data through clean comparison tables and indexable text that AI can easily cite as the "source of truth."

See how banking giants are winning the AI search war

‍

How to apply this to your strategy

If you are looking to lead your market in the era of AI, start here.

• Identify the value intercept: Stop looking only at traffic volume. Measure how often your brand is cited in AI summaries. Every missing citation is a golden opportunity for you to step in and lead the research phase.
• Audit for scannability (yes, this again): Ensure your technical setup matches your marketing vision. If you want to be the definitive authority, your data must be machine readable and effortless for the AI to scrape.
• Clarify your trust signals: Highlight the credentials of your experts. When your content includes clear markers of expertise, the AI can confidently recommend you to your future customers.

Watch the full episode on YouTube or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

You can also subscribe to our newsletter for all the exclusive, bonus content from both this episode and our study!