1. AI Overviews Have Limited Impact on Real-Time News

Although AI Overviews are increasingly visible across search results, data shows that they rarely dominate breaking-news queries.

A NewzDash analysis found that only 1.9% of major trending news keywords trigger an AI Overview. Traditional features such as Top Stories, Live Coverage, and News Carousels still control the most time-sensitive search traffic.

AI Overviews tend to appear:

6–9 hours after major events, once immediate reporting slows

For low-competition or low-coverage queries

For broad entity searches without qualifiers

This indicates that AI summarization currently supplements—not replaces—news visibility. For high-velocity topics, traditional SEO signals and news-specific optimization remain primary.

2. “Good Enough” Core Web Vitals Are Typically Sufficient

Core Web Vitals (CWV) influence usability, but their direct ranking impact is often overstated.

The practical role of CWV is indirect:

Poor loading speed and instability frustrate users

Frustrated users exit quickly

Negative engagement signals weaken rankings

The takeaway:

Aim for “mostly green” CWV scores. Reducing friction is valuable, but aggressively chasing perfect scores usually has limited SEO return. Resources are better used on content quality, technical stability, and structured markup.

3. Clean Code Matters Less Than Clear Meaning

Minimal HTML is no longer a major ranking factor. Google’s crawlers tokenize and strip non-semantic code before parsing, meaning that small formatting inefficiencies do not affect understanding.

What does matter is semantic clarity.

To strengthen machine comprehension:

Use semantic HTML5 tags such as <article>, <section>, <nav>

Use these tags to signal content purpose and hierarchy

Avoid unnecessary wrappers that obscure content meaning

Explicit structure improves indexing accuracy and reduces interpretation errors, especially as AI systems rely more on contextual segmentation.

4. Content Chunking Improves Retrieval for AI Systems

Search engines increasingly incorporate large language models and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). These systems depend on clear content “chunks” that can be extracted, linked, and cited.

Effective chunking requires:

1. Semantic anchors

Use <article>, <section>, <header>, <footer> to define boundaries.

2. Hierarchical headings

Apply <h1>–<h6> consistently to mark topic shifts and subtopics.

This approach improves:

LLM comprehension

Content retrieval during grounding

Relevance scoring across AI summarization features

A simple guideline applies:

If a section is clear to a human reader, it is usually clear to an LLM.

5. Avoid Unproven “AI SEO” Tactics

New tools and trends appear rapidly, but many lack demonstrated impact.

Examples include:

LLMs.txt: not adopted by Google and minimally implemented

Overuse of FAQs, lists, or keyword-dense sections: now interpreted similarly to legacy keyword-stuffing

Gimmicks claiming to make content “AI-proof”: rarely supported by evidence

Google engineers have clarified that AI Overviews and similar features rely on traditional search grounding:

AI systems issue multiple queries to Google Search and build summaries from the returned results.

This directly links AI visibility to strong traditional SEO performance, not experimental techniques.

The Core SEO Principles Still Anchor AI Visibility

Despite rapid changes, the underlying requirements for visibility in both classic search and AI-generated results remain consistent:

Strong technical SEO

Clear semantic structure

Reliable, well-sourced information

Stable user experience

Meaningful topical focus and expertise

These elements help search engines and LLMs identify authoritative, relevant content that can be summarized, cited, or ranked.

Rather than trying to “optimize for AI” in isolation, the goal is to create content that is structurally transparent, contextually rich, and aligned with long-established SEO fundamentals.

In a landscape filled with speculation, maintaining disciplined, evidence-based SEO practices is the most dependable path to sustained visibility.