There’s an old joke that the best place to hide a dead body is page two of Google search results.
For years, the name of the game was to rank as highly as possible in the top 10 blue links. Some of the game resulted in mindless keyword stuffing and other SEO hacks. But it also created a value exchange: make useful content and receive traffic in return.
AI Overviews have changed the game, and not just because of “zero-click search.”
The SEO analytics firm Ahrefs recently reported that only 38% of the citations in AI Overviews match what shows up in the top 10 search results. In July 2025, that number was 76%.
That’s a 50% drop in just eight months. They also found that 31% of citations come from pages that don’t rank in the top 100 at all.
There’s no shortage of authorities claiming to know the new rules of the game. But everything is still in flux. What works today may not work tomorrow. What works for the Google ecosystem may not work for ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI engines.
All we know for sure is that climbing the same old ladder won’t yield the same results.
Here are a few related cartoons I’ve drawn over the years:
