What is ai overviews?

Why it matters for a contractor.

They appear on a majority of searches and sharply reduce clicks to the pages beneath them, which is why being cited inside the answer now matters as much as ranking below it.

The practical change is that ranking first stopped guaranteeing the click. When a summary answers the question at the top of the page, the links underneath it collect a fraction of what they used to, and the position you spent months earning is now below the fold in effect.

Being cited inside the summary is the new placement, and it is won on the same foundations as everything else here: content that answers a specific question directly, structure a machine can parse, and facts it can verify against other sources. A page that buries its answer three paragraphs into a preamble does not get lifted.

The upside for contractors is that commercial questions resist summarization. An overview can explain what a pool costs in general terms; it cannot tell a homeowner in a specific suburb who to call. That is why the hiring query is where the organic work still pays, and why being the verifiable local answer matters more than ever.

What to ask a vendor about it.

• Which of my target queries currently show an AI Overview?
• Am I cited in any of them, and who is?
• Do my pages answer the question in the first paragraph or bury it?
• How is traffic from those queries trending against last year?