Google AI Overviews spiked during March 2025 core update

Google’s AI Overviews expanded greatly in three sectors – entertainment, restaurants, and travel – during the March 2025 core update.

By the numbers. Between March 13 and 27, according to data shared with Search Engine Land by enterprise SEO platform BrightEdge, the presence of AI Overviews grew by:

• 528% for entertainment queries (e.g., [Julia Roberts movies], [Movies filmed in Chicago]).
• 387% for restaurant queries (e.g., [date night restaurants], [Thai restaurant near me], [downtown restaurants]).
• 381% for travel queries (e.g., [things to do in Santa Fe], [things to do in Hawaii], [things to do in Las Vegas]).

But. Part of the reason for these high percentage increases is because these three industries historically have triggered AI Overviews less often when compared to categories like healthcare and education.

Why we care. If you do SEO for brands or businesses in the entertainment, restaurant, or travel industries, you should check whether AI Overviews are now appearing in Google SERPs on any mission-critical keywords, as this could alter your traffic and click-through rates from search. Even if your rankings haven’t changed, your traffic could be impacted by the arrival of AI Overviews.

What to do? Here are three areas to focus on, according to Jim Yu, founder and executive chair of BrightEdge:

• Create content that supports decision-making, including activities and ideas for things to do.
• Track and refresh content that matches shifting seasonal interest.
• Optimize for entity-driven searches, especially in entertainment or around prominent people in your organization

The core update. Google’s March 2025 core update started rolling out March 13 and completed March 27. Barry Schwartz dug into the impact in Data providers: Google March 2025 core update had similar volatility to the previous update.