The most useful thing known about AI Overviews is where they get their material. Analysis by SEOClarity found that over 99% of the sources cited in AI Overviews came from the top ten web results, and nearly 80% from the top three, which means the summary is not an alternative to ranking. It is a reward for it.
You cannot be cited if you do not rank
A good deal of commentary suggests search optimisation is finished and something new has replaced it. That is not what the evidence shows.
If almost every source a summary quotes was already on the first page, and most were in the top three, then the path into an answer runs through the same ranking work it always did. A contractor sitting at position fifteen is not going to be summarised into the top of the page. They are going to be absent from both.
That reframes the whole question. The work is not to abandon ranking in favour of some new discipline; it is to rank, and then to be written clearly enough to be worth quoting.
Which searches actually produce a summary
They do not appear everywhere, and the pattern matters for a trade. Search Engine Journal found AI Overviews appearing for 74% of problem-solving queries and 69% of question-based ones.
Those are the informational searches: why is my heating making that noise, how long should this last, is this dangerous. Exactly the material a contractor was told to write, and exactly where the click is now most likely to be absorbed.
The searches that book work: a trade and a town, something urgent, behave differently, because they resolve into local results with a map and phone numbers. That is the split worth holding in your head: your informational pages are exposed, and your commercial ones largely are not.
What it costs when the answer is read out
Pew Research Center found that users shown an AI summary clicked a link 8% of the time, against 15% for those who were not, roughly half.
For a publisher that halves the business. For a contractor it halves a channel that was already indirect: those readers were rarely booking that day. The loss is real and it is a loss of familiarity rather than of bookings, which is why it shows up in your analytics long before it shows up in your diary.
So the strategy is unchanged, with one addition
Rank for the things that matter, which is the same work as ever: pages that cover a job properly, a profile that is accurate, reviews that are current, a site that loads.
The addition is being quotable once you are there. A page that buries its answer under three paragraphs of preamble can rank well and still supply nothing extractable. Stating the answer plainly in the first sentence or two costs nothing and is the whole of the technique.
What it is not is a separate service with a separate invoice, the argument in whether contractors need GEO.
Frequently asked questions
Does SEO still matter with AI Overviews?
More than the commentary suggests. SEOClarity found over 99% of cited sources came from the top ten results and nearly 80% from the top three, so ranking is the route into the summary rather than an alternative to it.
Which of my pages are most affected?
Informational ones. Overviews appeared for 74% of problem-solving and 69% of question-based queries in Search Engine Journal’s analysis, while searches that book work still resolve into local results.
How much traffic does an overview cost?
Pew found click-through roughly halved, 8% against 15%. For a contractor that is mostly a loss of familiarity rather than of bookings, which is why it appears in analytics before it appears in the diary.
What should I change?
Nothing structural. Rank as before, and state your answers plainly near the top of the page so there is something worth quoting once you are there.
Where to start
Find a question your customers ask that you already rank on the first page for. Read the top of that page and ask whether a stranger could lift one clean sentence from it as the answer. If not, that sentence is the work.
Real Time Marketing has worked with home service contractors since 2016: plumbing, HVAC, roofing, electrical and other trades, nationwide, from our office in Bradenton, Florida. Agreements are month-to-month. See our answer engine optimisation or book a strategy call.