Moz urges agencies to rethink AI search visibility beyond rankings

Google launched AI Overviews in the United States on May 14, 2024, saying hundreds of millions of users would get access that week and that the product would reach more than a billion people by the end of 2024. Moz is telling agencies to stop grading AI search on clicks and rankings. Tom Capper’s June 24, 2026 post argues the value often never shows up as a click or even a ranking, and a brand can be recommended without being cited.

A year later, Google rolled out AI Mode in the U.S. and called it its most powerful AI search experience. Google also said AI Overviews had driven more than a 10% increase in usage of Google for query types that show them in its biggest markets, including the U.S. and India.

Pew Research Center studied 900 U.S. adults and 68,879 unique Google searches from March 2025. It found that 58% of respondents conducted at least one search that produced an AI-generated summary. Users were less likely to click result links when a summary appeared, and they very rarely clicked the sources cited inside it.

AI search is still part of SEO, but the blend, priority and execution have changed. The work now is making sure AI systems retrieve the right information and represent the brand correctly. Grounding searches can pull from multiple sources, including off-site pages, which pushes the work beyond on-page tweaks and title-tag games.

Moz is already packaging that shift into products. Moz Pro’s AI Visibility tool tracks a brand’s presence in AI-generated search results from ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Mode, while its AI Overviews tracking flags keywords that trigger an Overview so teams can see where clicks disappear and where placement may be won.