When Google rolled out the AI overview to the public in 2024, website owners/managers feared its potential impact on organic click-through rates (CTRs).
And rightly so.
By the first quarter of 2025, a Bain & Company research found that about 80% of users relied on AI summaries for their searches, and 60% of those searches ended without users clicking on any other website on the SERP.
While many digital marketers, content creators, and small business owners perceive this phenomenon to be the beginning of the end for their SEO efforts and goals, many others are revisiting their SEO strategies with AI Overview (AIO) in mind.
Moz, through its array of AIO-focused SEO tools, is helping businesses and individuals make sense of AIO and generate valuable data that helps them optimize their website for search engines and improve their rankings.
This step-by-step guide demonstrates how you can use Moz for incisive AIO research and generate data for high-impact SEO campaigns.
But first…
Why Bother With AIO Research?
In January 2025, after analyzing 46,000 keywords to determine how AIO affects search results in the US and the UK, across mobile and desktop, Whiteboard Friday found that 10% of keywords had some sort of AI overview.
By midyear, over 50% of all search results had an AI overview.
Today, nearly every search result comes with a relevant AI overview on the SERP, often with more exhaustive details in the “AI Mode” section.
Clearly, the rise of AI overviews is unwaveringly progressive, and dominance seems certain.
This signals a strong need for website owners/managers to take extra steps to make their websites visible in the AIOs if they want to stay ahead of their competitors.
To meet new SERP demands, Google suggests applying foundational SEO best practices for AI overview and AI mode results.
With this in mind, SEO experts leverage three Moz features to adapt:
- Keyword Explorer: For identifying keyword opportunities for AIO.
- LinkExplorer: For analyzing competitor backlinks listed in the overview.
- DomainAnalysis: For assessing page and domain authority.
The following steps outline how these features can be applied in practice, based on guidance from the Moz team.
Step 1: Use Moz Keyword Explorer to Find AIO Keyword Opportunities
First, make a list of your target keywords, including those that generate impressions and drive traffic to your website.
You can cross-reference your target keywords with click and impression data from your website’s Google Search Console.
Insert the keywords in your Moz Keyword Explorer for further analysis.
Evaluate AIO-Relevant Signals in Keyword Explorer
Results displayed on the explorer page offer various insights for determining keyword opportunities for AIO:
Primary Search Intent
Review whether the primary search intent for the given keyword is informational, commercial, transactional, or navigational. Generally, keywords with informational intent tend to be the most likely to have an AIO. Keywords with commercial and transactional intent are less likely to have an AIO, and often fare better for direct conversions.
Keyword Difficulty
Keywords with high difficulty also tend to have very competitive AIO and are often dominated by established authority sites.
AI Overview Results
The “SERP Features” section includes an “AI Overview” subsection, which provides some very important information, including:
- The description of the AIO for the keyword
- The competitors featured in the AIO and their content.
Reviewing the AI Overview results can help you determine if there is an opportunity for Google to feature your website in the AIO for the given keywords.
Assess Competitive Realism
AIOs featuring highly anecdotal platforms (such as Reddit and Quora), YouTube, and renowned authority websites are harder to break into.
If penetrating the competitive environment appears unrealistic, use the “Top Suggestions” on the Keyword Explorer to find similar keywords with:
- Commercial and or transactional search intent.
- Lower competition
Then, create content around such keywords or use them to update old content that are underperforming.
But if the competitive environment looks attainable, you can proceed to analyze the backlinks of the competitors featured in the AIO.
Step 2: Use Moz Link Explorer for Competitor Analysis and Find Content Gap
In cases where the featured competitors are not particularly authoritative or trustworthy, ample opportunities exist for any other website with better strategies or reputation to improve their content around the given keyword and be featured in its AIO.
Simply copy your competitors’ links, then go to Moz Link Explorer for further analysis to determine why AIO and other websites link to their website but not yours.
How to Use Link Intersect for Content Gap Analysis
Navigate to the Link Intersect tool on the page:
- Enter your URL in the first field, then enter the competitors’ URLs (featured in the AIO) in the fields that follow.
- Use the dropdown menu beside each field to select the domain level for the content gap analysis.
- Choose the “exact page” level in the dropdown.
- Click “find opportunities”.
Analyze Competitors’ Strengths for Pointers
The result reveals the specific webpages that link back to your competitors’ URLs, providing insight into the topics, paragraphs, keywords, or anchors that other websites, and probably AIO, link back to that exact page.
The insight helps you determine why the AIO algorithm might have chosen to feature the given page, and provides pointers for creating better content for your website.
You can further explore individual competitors by their root domain on the Link Explorer main page or Moz’s proprietary Domain Authority Checker (DA).
Step 3: Use Moz DA to Assess Page Authority and Domain Authority
Use the Domain Authority® checker to assess your page or domain authority, as well as that of your competitors.
Enter the URL in the search field, then click “Check DA”, and the checker releases results across seven themes:
- Domain authority ranking
- Linking root domains
- Ranking keywords
- Spam score
- Top pages by links
- Top linking domains
- Discovered and lost linking domains
Within the AIO research context, the page authority ranking (top pages by links) provides a general overview of the pages that are most likely to be linked (from your website) as well as the most popular pages on your competitor’s websites.
This information can be important to developing a high-performing content strategy that takes your pages to the top of the SERP while increasing the chances of being featured in the AIO for the given keyword.
Staying Ahead of AIO Trends
It is true that AI overviews pose a threat to organic website traffic. However, with all areas of AI, it is important to find, access, and utilize the opportunities as they emerge.
Conducting extensive AIO research easily places you several steps ahead of your competitors in the overall SEO race, giving you a very competitive advantage.
AIO is still a work in progress, and business owners and digital marketers often struggle to integrate emerging AIO strategies into broader SEO campaigns.
321 Web Marketing helps businesses implement integrated SEO strategies, combining in-depth AIO research with multichannel, cross-platform tactics to deliver lasting marketing results.
