How the search results page has changed with AI Overviews A comparison of the Google search results page before and after AI Overviews, covering organic click share, ad placement, zero-click searches and cost per click, ending with the point that paid search is now one of the few guaranteed placements on the page. The results page has changed underneath you What's different since AI Overviews arrived BEFORE VS NOW BEFORE NOW Organic clicks Top organic result got a healthy share of clicks Compressed, the AI answer sits above it and absorbs clicks Ad placement Ads sat above organic, separate from the summary Often shown above or alongside the AI Overview Zero-click searches Happened, but not the norm for most searches Increasingly common for informational queries Cost per click Driven mainly by advertiser competition alone Rising, as fewer guaranteed spots get fought over harder WHAT THIS MEANS Paid search is one of the few guaranteed placements left Budget with that in mind, not against it Rising CPCs aren't a sign your account is doing worse. The page itself is genuinely more competitive now.

Something's different, and it isn't your account

A few Google Ads management clients have asked some version of the same question lately: why does cost per click keep drifting up when nothing about the campaigns themselves has changed? Nine times out of ten, the answer isn't hiding in the account at all. It's sitting on the results page itself, which looks quite different to how it did even eighteen months ago.

AI Overviews, the AI-generated summary that now appears at the top of a lot of Google searches, have changed how much room there is above the fold, and who gets a share of it. That's not a small tweak. It's reshaped the whole shape of the page for a huge chunk of search queries.

Where organic clicks have actually gone

For years, the top organic result could expect a decent, fairly predictable share of clicks on any given search. AI Overviews sit above that, often answering the question directly on the page, which means a real portion of searchers never scroll down to a website at all. This isn't the case for every search, transactional queries with clear buying intent are less affected than broad informational ones, but for a lot of the research-stage searches that used to feed organic traffic, the click just doesn't happen the way it used to.

This is why organic traffic can look flat or even decline slightly even when rankings haven't actually moved. The ranking's fine. Fewer people are clicking through to get to it. That doesn't mean SEO is dead. It means running SEO alongside paid search matters more than ever.

Where ads now sit on the page

Paid results, on the other hand, are increasingly shown above or alongside the AI Overview itself rather than being pushed further down the page. That's a meaningful shift. Ads are one of the few things on a results page that still reliably show up in a prominent spot, regardless of what the AI summary decides to answer or skip. It's part of why paid search hasn't seen the same click erosion organic has, even on searches where an AI Overview appears.

Why cost per click keeps rising

Put those two things together and the CPC increase most advertisers have noticed over the past year makes a lot more sense. If fewer prominent spots exist on a page, and paid placement is one of the few still reliably visible, competition for those spots naturally increases. More advertisers fighting over less guaranteed real estate pushes prices up, independent of anything happening inside any individual account.

Quick check: If your CPC has risen steadily over the past year across otherwise stable campaigns, check whether it's happened broadly across your industry too, not just for you. A quick look at auction insights will usually confirm whether this is a market-wide shift rather than something specific to your account.

What this actually means for your budget

This isn't really a reason to panic, but it is a reason to think differently about where paid search sits in your marketing. On informational, research-stage searches, expecting organic content to reliably drive traffic the way it did a few years ago is increasingly optimistic. Paid search, particularly on higher intent, closer-to-purchase searches, has become more valuable precisely because it's one of the few placements Google hasn't compressed.

Practically, that tends to mean weighting budget more toward the search terms where someone's clearly ready to act, rather than spreading spend thinly across broad, informational queries that were already losing value to AI Overviews anyway. It also makes tight conversion tracking even more important, since every click is more expensive than it used to be, and there's less room to waste budget on traffic that was never going to convert.

The bottom line

If your cost per click has crept up and your first instinct is to assume something's wrong with the account, it's worth checking the bigger picture first. The results page genuinely looks different now, organic clicks are being absorbed by AI answers on a lot of searches, and paid placement has become one of the more dependable spots left on the page. That's not a reason to pull back from Google Ads. If anything, it's a reason to make sure the budget you are spending is going toward the searches most likely to actually convert.