By Joyce Isidro
For more than a decade, SEO professionals and content marketers have chased one goal: the number one spot on Google.
That elusive number one search result signaled authority, trust, and most importantly, visibility.
Then came something even more powerful: Position Zero.
Position Zero places your content above every other link, put in a distinct box that draws the user’s eye and often earns their valued click.
In 2025, with the arrival of AI Overviews, the rules have changed once again. We’ve entered an era where the search engine has become an answer engine.
So, how can brands, creators, and marketers adapt?
How do you “rank” in an environment where Google—and increasingly, other AI-driven search platforms—write the answer for you?
Here’s how to win Position Zero in the age of AI Overviews.
1. Understand the meaning and value of Position Zero
To understand how to win that highly coveted spot, we need to understand what Position Zero used to mean.
When Google first introduced featured snippets, they were designed to provide quick answers pulled directly from websites for questions like “How to clean white sneakers” or “Why is the sky blue?”
These snippets rewarded clarity, structure, and authority. The best-performing content gave concise answers in a paragraph, list, or table.
Then came voice assistants and mobile search, where snippets became the spoken responses of Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant.
That was the first major shift in how we consumed search results: we started reading less and listening more.
Now, with AI Overviews, Google doesn’t just pull one snippet from a single source; it creates a synthesized response based on multiple sources.
In other words, Google’s AI writes the answer for you.
It might cite your site. It might not. It might quote your paragraph directly, or it might paraphrase it beyond recognition.
This is the new Position Zero: where visibility is earned through semantic relevance, authority signals, and machine interpretability.
2. Learn how AI Overviews work
AI Overviews are part of Google’s broader move toward the Search Generative Experience (SGE).
Instead of showing a list of links, SGE presents a generated overview that summarizes key points from multiple sources.
What this means is these summaries don’t only rely on the number one search result. They come from other top-ranking content, structured data, and authority and trust indicators (such as Google’s E-E-A-T framework) among others.
And because AI Overviews draw information from several sources, your content might also constitute part of an answer even if you’re not the top result.
To appear in an AI Overview, your content needs to be accurate and well-sourced. In other words, it needs to be of good quality.
Perhaps most importantly, in the age of AI overviews, your content needs to be formatted in a way AI can easily parse.
This is precisely why it’s important to optimize not just for human readability, but for AI readability as well.
3. Optimize for AI readability, not just human readability
Search has evolved from keyword recognition to semantic understanding. Unlike typical search, AI Overviews don’t look for exact phrases; they look for relationships between ideas.
This means your writing style matters more than ever, because AI doesn’t read nuance or fluff well, so you need to focus on creating content that is simple and structured so that it can easily quote you or summarize the information you provide.
If you’re a writer or marketer, the challenge here is making sure that your content is both human-friendly and machine-friendly.
One way to optimize for AI readability is by using schema markup, as it gives AI clear signals about your content type.
Another way is through consistent formatting—giving your content clear subheadings, numbers, or defined sections make your content easier to parse.
Also, defining important terms in your content improves machine comprehension. So when you include specific data, examples, or statistics, you’re giving AI information that it can easily read.
Think of your content as teaching material for a machine. It needs to be structured clearly enough for a computer to understand and give it priority ranking, so that it can be easily found by the people looking for it.
4. Target questions, not just keywords
Keyword-based SEO is no longer enough. AI Overviews are built on natural language queries: full questions that reflect how people actually talk.
In traditional SEO, we target keywords such as “best coffee machine.” But for AI overviews, those that get featured are results for full queries, like “what’s the best coffee machine?”
This means that if you’re aiming for position zero, you need to optimize for questions, not just phrases or keywords, as is usually determined by traditional SEO .
The good news is, if you’re an SEO or keyword researcher, the process for finding these queries is easy to learn if you already know how to conduct keyword research.
Now that we’re learning about AI Overviews, you already know that instead of looking for keywords, you need to look for questions.
But the same concept applies: you still need to have a good understanding of search intent.
Once you know the questions, structure your content around them. The answers should be direct and factual (of course), with relevant supporting data and, if necessary, some expert opinion.
Let’s take an example.
If the question is: Can AI-generated content hurt SEO?
Your answer should immediately address the concern: Yes—if it’s low-quality or lacks originality
As you can see, the answer above is very straightforward. Obviously, there should still be a detailed explanation for people reading your article, but to optimize for AI, this direct question-and-answer format works best.
And as SEO specialists and marketers, if you work in a specific niche, you also need to build authority over your field of expertise to get cited.
5. Build topical authority, not just individual posts
AI Overviews rely heavily on authority signals. The algorithm needs to trust that your content is part of a credible knowledge ecosystem, not a one-off post.
This is why you need to build topical authority over your niche.
Topical authority is built when you consistently write in-depth content over your field of expertise. In technical terms, you don’t simply publish isolated articles. Instead, you build interconnected “topic clusters.”
For instance, a brand focusing on AI marketing might have pillar pages about “AI in SEO” or “AI in video,” supported by subtopics such as AI ethics, AI tools, and AI content generation.
Internal linking between these articles also reinforces the semantic connections that AI looks for.
Authority also depends on the human element — your author credentials, experience, and citations.
This is why it’s important to include expert bios, list qualifications, and link to reliable sources (such as government databases or academic research) to solidify authority.
Over time, this establishes trust in your brand. Consequently, when AI Overviews scan for reliable sources, they’ll recognize your site as a consistent, expert voice in your field.
6. Utilize structured data and semantic SEO
Structured data, also called schema markup, is the code that helps search engines understand the meaning of your content.
This is your passport into AI Overviews.
By adding schema markup, you’re allowing AI systems to interpret your page precisely.
An FAQ schema can be particularly useful because of the question-and-answer nature of AI overviews.
Other schema types, such as Product, Article, and BlogPosting, help AI distinguish between reviews, insights, and informational pages.
Semantic SEO complements this by focusing on the relationships between topics rather than isolated keywords.
A comprehensive piece about “AI Overviews” should also explore related terms such as “Search Generative Experience,” “featured snippets,” “semantic search,” and “E-E-A-T.”
Covering a topic holistically helps AI understand your site’s thematic expertise. The broader your coverage, the more likely you will get cited by Google’s AI.
7. Treat AI Overviews as discovery, not competition
When Google rolled out AI Overviews in the US in 2024, many website owners reported a significant loss in traffic, with their click-through rates dropping to as low as 89%.
This makes it easy to view AI Overviews as competition, especially because they have already significantly reduced clicks by answering user queries directly.
But this perspective misses the bigger opportunity. Instead of viewing it as the enemy, AI Overviews can actually serve as a new form of top-of-funnel discovery.
How?
Well, when your brand or content is cited in these summaries, you gain massive visibility even if users don’t immediately visit your site.
In the short term, it does reduce clicks. But AI Overviews is the new position zero, which means that every mention of your brand in an AI Overview builds recognition and credibility.
Over time, this exposure helps establish expertise in your niche.
Think of AI Overviews as a form of “ambient branding” — you may not get the click, but being placed in an “everyday” setting helps establish your brand in the mind of users.
8. Create what AI can’t replace
In the age of AI, it’s scary to think that human creativity might be getting replaced.
There are already useful tools like AI text-to-video, which can help businesses turn textual material into training videos, and AI translators, which can help you reach diverse audiences by translating your content at the speed of light.
But these tools are just that—tools.
AI can’t replicate firsthand experience, human emotion, or nuanced judgment. It doesn’t produce genuine storytelling, contrarian insight, or proprietary data. Those are your differentiators.
If AI Overviews summarize existing knowledge, your job is to produce what can’t be summarized—original, experiential, and emotional content.
To stand out, focus on original research, authentic opinions, and human perspective. A generic article titled “10 AI SEO Tactics” can be summarized by AI.
But a piece like “How I Used AI Overviews to Double Organic Traffic in Three Months” cannot.
That’s unique, lived expertise. Including case studies, interviews, and visual content such as original charts or videos adds credibility that AI can’t fabricate.
Maybe AI can create false, hallucinated content, but even if this type of content can get clicks, it won’t build customer loyalty and engagement. In the end, it’s still real, human stories that win them over.
Remember that getting Position Zero is important, but it’s not the end-all-be-all. It’s also just as important to be cited by human writers, and nothing makes you more authoritative than a fellow expert treating your content as a source worth citing.
9. Measure success beyond clicks
The traditional SEO metrics of impressions and click-through rates are becoming less reliable indicators of success.
AI Overviews are designed to reduce friction for users, which means they also reduce clicks.
That doesn’t mean SEO is dead; it just compels us to measure success beyond traditional metrics (like click-through rates).
So instead of getting tunnel-visioned solely on traffic, it might be better to track how often your brand or domain appears in AI Overviews or generative results. Visibility in “People Also Ask” or related sections also remains a signal of relevance.
Most importantly, monitor growth in branded searches and returning visitors, because both of these show that brand awareness is getting converted into brand trust. Even if AI provides the first answer, your brand can still be the authority behind it.
10. Future-proof your SEO for the era of AI
AI Overviews might still be evolving, but the direction is clear: it’s here to stay.
To future-proof your SEO, start by investing in quality over quantity. Produce fewer but deeper and better-sourced pieces of content.
Because thin or generic AI-generated content will not make it into Overviews. Content that considers machine readability, structured data, and human expertise will.
So focus on a strategy that strengthens your reputation signals, like mentions and backlinks from other authoritative sources.
Experimenting with emerging tools such as AI video can also be productive as AI is learning to summarize multimodal content, too.
Regularly auditing your site’s presence within AI systems like SGE, Bing Copilot, and Perplexity can help you see how well you’re being represented.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, incorporate SEO with AI literacy: understand not only how algorithms rank content, but how language models interpret and synthesize your work.
Because writing for search engines today means writing for both humans and machines.
11. The human advantage
As AI automates surface-level information, the human advantage becomes clearer because users don’t trust data alone; they trust people with something to say.
Your voice, expertise, and perspective are what sets your content apart from every generative summary on the web.
The brands that thrive in the AI era will be those that combine algorithmic precision with human warmth.
AI can surface useful content, but it’s notoriously bad at building trust all on its own. It can be useful for discoverability, but you still need to do the legwork to gain customer loyalty.
In this sense, AI isn’t replacing human writers and marketers; it’s boosting those who bring something valuable to the table.