The Funnel-Position Defense Against AI Overviews
AI answers eat top-of-funnel search. Move your SEO to where intent and conversion live.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 93%
Schwartz's model of what AI Overviews and LLM chat actually disrupt: the discovery step. Broad, curiosity-driven queries ('best beach vacations', 'top podcast tools', 'what is a CRM') get answered in a paragraph at the top of the page, so the long-form article that used to win that first click is now buried and irrelevant. What survives is mid- and bottom-funnel search, where the user has narrowed down and has intent to act. The test for any SEO asset is whether an AI paragraph could fully substitute for it.
Origin
Eli Schwartz's own analysis, revised in public — he predicted an 'apocalypse' a year earlier, then refined it into a funnel-position argument once Google's AI Overviews (formerly SGE) rolled out broadly to logged-out users in 2024.
Core principles
- 01AI Overviews do not make your content harder to find; they make it less relevant.
- 02Top-of-funnel = curiosity, no intent, big keyword volume, now answered by AI.
- 03Mid/bottom-funnel = intent, less traffic, but a KPI that tracks a business metric.
- 04If an AI paragraph can fully satisfy the user's need, that page was never a defensible asset.
- 05Information businesses lose; action businesses (a hotel bed, a pair of shoes) do not — the number of people who need to take the action does not change.
How to run it
- 1
Map the user's journey from curiosity to action
Write out the actual sequence: 'top podcast tools' (top) → 'Riverside pricing', 'Riverside capacity' (bottom). Identify at which stage your asset currently sits.
Pro tip Mid-funnel is simply where intent begins. Ask: does this searcher already want to do something specific?
- 2
Apply the substitution test
For each page, ask whether a generated paragraph could give the user everything they came for. Generic health content, listicles and comparison roundups fail this test. Pages that deliver a unique solve — a home valuation, a hotel booking, a Tinder download in a specific city — pass.
Pro tip Structured-data-style answers (dates, statistics, definitions) were always going to be absorbed; Google is now converting unstructured content into that same answerable form.
Watch out Do not comfort yourself with 'we haven't seen a traffic drop'. Concurrent algorithm updates mask the effect, and the broad rollout is recent.
- 3
Rebuild your SEO around the mid-funnel solve
Move investment from the roundup article to the page that resolves the problem the AI answer just created. Where the AI names a destination, be the page that books it. Where it names three tools, be the page that closes the sale.
Pro tip An AI Overview that names you as a brand is a branding win; an AI Overview that summarizes your content and links to you means Google took your content for free.
In the wild
A user with a headache used to plough through six pages of WebMD content to find that 0.2% of headaches are tumours. Google now just tells them to take a nap and drink water. But the follow-on — read the actual medical paper, find the nearest doctor with the right hours — remains a real search.
→ Generic-content publishers lose the ad-funded click; the action-oriented mid-funnel search remains intact.
An AI Overview can describe the dating scene in Dubai and suggest date spots. It cannot resolve the user's loneliness. The user still clicks through to Tinder.
→ Schwartz's conclusion: because the asset sits in the buyer journey, AI Overviews change nothing for it.
Common mistakes
Keeping the SEO strategy anchored to top-of-funnel head terms
SEO teams stayed at the top of the funnel because rankings were their KPI. Those exact queries are the ones AI answers now absorb, so the KPI keeps looking healthy while the business value evaporates.
Assuming no apocalypse because traffic has not fallen yet
AI Overviews only recently reached logged-out users and international markets, and simultaneous algorithm updates disguise the baseline. Absence of visible damage is not evidence of safety.
Is it for you?
Best for
Content-heavy sites and marketplaces whose organic traffic concentrates on informational head terms and who need to reposition before the rollout bites.
Not ideal for
Businesses whose search traffic is already bottom-funnel and transactional — they largely have nothing to move.
From the transcript
“actually it's not that it's harder to find your stuff becomes less relevant and that that's the part about SEO that I'm excited”
“whoever won on that long form piece of content would get that first click but now that doesn't exist anymore”
“you need to be in the buyer Journey with the SEO you're creating and it doesn't matter what AI overviews does or doesn't do because…”
From the episode
Rethinking SEO in the age of AI
Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author)