SERP, SEO and AI Overview: history repeats itself

Everything that is SERP is SEO, even the AI Overview. It is not the end of search, but just another change of clothes for Google.

The criteria remain the same: authority, relevance, structure, quality, only now they end up in an AI box instead of ten blue links. History repeats itself.

SEO: predictable tragedies that become routine

“History repeats itself twice: first as tragedy, then as farce.”

Karl Marx wrote this in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, mocking those who thought that political events could be reincarnated with the same force as in the past. In his example, the French Revolution with Napoleon was the tragedy; the coup d’état by his nephew, Louis Bonaparte, was a farcical caricature.

And if we look at the digital world, it seems that Google has taken that concept and is turning it into a recurring format: every new development starts out as an epoch-making tragedy, only to turn out to be more of a routine than a “farce,” which the industry learns to manage.

Think about it: when featured snippets arrived, the reaction was “they’re stealing our clicks, SEO is over!” Panic, digital obituaries, improvised experts writing eulogies. Then, calmly, brands figured out how to exploit them: FAQs, definitions, guides. The same applies to the arrival of Ads at the top of the SERP (“no one will find us anymore!”), to mobile-first, to every new interface that Google has put in front of users’ eyes. Predicted tragedies that, without fail, have turned into opportunities for growth.

AI Overview: Google changes form, not substance

And here we are at AI Overview, the new protagonist of the story. At first, it was a small experiment, a timid box with a few lines, but today it has become a wall of text generated by Gemini, enriched with links, images, and entire paragraphs that look more like an article than a search result. It’s normal that the first reaction was to cry tragedy.

But if we use the lens of The Eighteenth Brumaire, the script is clear: this is not a tragedy, but something we have already experienced and that can become an opportunity. Because Google is doing what it has always done: changing the form of the SERP without changing the substance of SEO.

Users save steps, SEOs have to reorganize their strategies. Nothing more, nothing less.

Everything that is SERP is SEO

The point is simple: if something ends up in the SERP, then it is SEO.

It is always Google that decides what to show, and it decides based on criteria that we know well: authority, relevance, clarity, structure. There is no separate “SEO for AI”: there is SEO, period.

AI Overviews are just a new interface for the same rules. Content that is not scanned, indexed, and deemed suitable for ranking will never even enter a generative box.

So the job remains the same: create fresh, structured, and comprehensive content with clear signals of trust and authority. The difference is that now we don’t just have to aim for the top position, but become Google’s source of choice for summarizing the topic.

The future of AI Overview is not a prophecy, but the natural evolution of search engines: it will become the new SERP, which is basically the old SERP in a different guise.

No one knows you like AI Overview!

The power of AI Overview lies in this: it doesn’t give you just any answer, it gives you your answer. Google no longer just lists links, but reconstructs what you really need, breaking down the query into sub-questions, linking different sources, and customizing the summary based on context. It’s like that waiter who brings you the dish you didn’t even order, but deep down you wanted.

The Overview always seems “right” because it reads the intent behind the words, anticipates variations, and chooses what statistically interests you most.

And this is where SEOZoom comes in: it helps you build content that responds to specific user queries in the same way that Google breaks them down and reassembles them.

• With Question Explorer and Keyword Infinity, you map the real question (variations, sub-intents, long tail) and transform the user’s query into a set of micro-answers ready to be “extracted” in AI summaries.
• With AI Engine, you evaluate in advance how selectable a page is by Google AI Overview (and also by ChatGPT/Perplexity), identifying weaknesses in relevance, structure, and completeness.
• With AI Overview Analysis, you measure if and where you are mentioned in the generative response, how much visibility you get, what AI Rank you achieve compared to competitors, and what traffic you are actually intercepting.
• With the content gap, you identify the questions that trigger the Overview where competitors are present and you are not, so you can design the “best answer” for that specific intent.

While Google personalizes the response for the user, you personalize the content for Google (and for people) with data in hand, from the choice of sub-questions to the hierarchy of paragraphs, maximizing the chances that your page will become the source cited within the AI Overview.

The future of SEO is not panic, but opportunity

What we are experiencing today is not the end of SEO, but yet another reincarnation of a script we know well. Every time Google changes its approach, there are those who announce the apocalypse and those who recognize the opportunity.

The truth is that we are not facing an incomprehensible revolution, but a natural evolution. For those who work seriously, there is no room for panic: there is a real possibility of becoming the source that Google cites in its AI summaries, instead of remaining in the background as a silent extra. The difference lies entirely in how we choose to interpret the present: whether to suffer change or govern it, chase fears or transform them into strategy.

And so the question is inevitable: do you want to face this transition as a tragedy to be feared, or as a farce to be dismantled with intelligence, method, and a touch of irony?