The final speaker in this final paper session at the SEASON 2026 conference in Hamburg is Tereza Schambergerová. Her focus is on the impact of search engine optimisation (SEO) on AI overviews, but she begins by introducing the three key theories of political economy in the attention economy, gatekeeping as it applies to search engines, and the agenda-setting function of search engines like Google.
Her work draws on three datasets, with a focus on the Czech Republic: AI overview monitoring data from DataForSEO; search volume information from Ahrefs; and real click-through rate (CTR) data using the Google Search Console. In combination, these show that AI overview coverage is still growing, with an average growth rate of 9.4% for 96% of the topics she tracked.
Overall, some 52% of all distinct queries now have AI overviews; meanwhile, though, 21% of all queries (including repeated queries) have AI overviews: queries which are asked more rarely (and which may be more complicated) are more likely to return an AI overview.
Topic growth is unevenly distributed, though, and greatest for topics like health, horoscopes, insurance, and investing, but smallest for celebrity and sports topics. Google also skipped AI overviews whenever there was a knowledge panel – for instance for queries about celebrities and other known entities – or a top stories carousel in the search results. Also, over the course of a year, queries which have an AI overview today lost more click-through than queries without one.
Classic long-tail SEO strategies are most vulnerable to these changes; fresh content, such as breaking news, seems to be least affected for now, though this may also change in the future. Local content may also still be able to avoid the reduced click-through rates that the presence of AI overviews results in. However, this is a very quickly moving field, and future patterns may well change substantially still.
