Page 37 - GBC Fall English 2025 flipbook

As more users trusted Google
to search the internet, Google
innovated further. They gave
businesses the opportunity to
circumvent organic results and pay
to be at the top of the SERP. This is
still how Google earns the majority
of its revenues. The discipline
dedicated to sponsored/paid
results on search engines is called
Search Engine Marketing, or SEM
for short.
To Recap:
SERP: The page that returns a list
of relevant web pages for a user
query.
SEO: Optimizing your digital
presence to appear higher
organically on SERP pages.
SEM: Paying to appear higher on
SERP pages.
The end result is that most
users rely on Search Engines like
Google to peruse websites on the
Internet. As a result, Search Engines
are the primary traffic generators
for all websites in the golf industry,
and any changes will impact the
performance of those websites.
GOOGLE’S CHANGE &
MARKETING’S CHALLENGE
For most of the last two decades,
SERPs have delivered one thing: a
list of relevant websites. Sure, some
sites on the list paid to be there,
some did not, and others might be
“In April, Forbes
reported that AI
Overview can cause
a 15-64% decline in
organic traffic. Our
own analysis of more
than 200 golf course
websites showed a
more than 22% decline
in organic traffic in
the first six months
after the launch of AI
Overview.”
generated from another platform
like Google Maps, but at the end of
the day, the SERP was one thing: A
list of relevant websites.
This made it the user’s
responsibility to find information—
they had to click through to the
websites and consume their
information to find their answer. In
the middle of 2024, Google kicked
off a new era of search by
introducing AI Overview.
WHAT IS AI OVERVIEW?
According to Google’s AI Overview
itself, “Google AI Overviews,
formerly known as Search
Generative Experience (SGE), is a
feature in Google Search that uses
artificial intelligence to generate
summaries of search results.
These AI-powered summaries
appear at the top of the search
results page and aim to provide
users with quick, comprehensive
answers to their queries by
synthesizing information from
various sources.”
Let’s break down what this
means. In the past, when a user
searched for something, Google
returned a list of websites that
might contain the answer and left
it to the user to visit those sites
individually.
Now, instead of delivering
the list of sites first, Google is
reading the content of those sites,
and presenting the user with an
AI-generated answer to their
question before the SERP
rankings. This means that many
users no longer need to click
through to websites. This includes
your website.
In April, Forbes reported
that AI Overview can cause a 15-
64% decline in organic traffic. Our
own analysis of more than 200
golf course websites showed a
more than 22% decline in organic
traffic in the first six months after
the launch of AI Overview.
HOW TO ADDRESS FALLING
SEARCH TRAFFIC
First, courses and clubs must
implement strategies to replace
organic traffic lost to AI
Overview. With search traffic
Golf Business Canada 37