What Happened
A new Search Engine Land contribution from content strategist Kristina Frunze lays out what many SEO professionals are seeing but few have acted on: AI Overviews are cannibalizing top-of-funnel (TOFU) clicks, and bottom-of-funnel (BOFU) content is emerging as the real revenue driver.
Frunze reports that across her SaaS clients, educational TOFU pages that drove steady traffic for years started losing ground — not because the content degraded, but because users no longer needed to click. AI Overviews answered the informational question before the user ever left the search page.
Her response: shift 60% to 80% of content output toward BOFU and mid-funnel content, keeping TOFU as a supporting structure rather than the main event. The most effective BOFU pieces? Comprehensive comparison and listicle-style guides targeting high-intent queries. One time-tracking software comparison guide became the most cited article in LLM responses within weeks, delivering more pipeline impact than a dozen informational posts from the previous quarter.
Critically, TOFU isn't being abandoned — it's being repositioned. Its new job is building topical authority, establishing expertise, and passing internal link equity to BOFU pages. The best-performing TOFU pieces are being retrofitted with product-connected sections, contextual CTAs, and subject matter expert input.
There's also an attribution problem: someone sees your solution in a ChatGPT response, researches your brand, and converts through a direct visit or branded search. In GA4, that journey shows up as direct traffic — making SEO's contribution invisible. Frunze now tracks brand search volume trends, LLM citation frequency, direct traffic movement after publication, and conversion rate changes rather than relying on click attribution alone.
Key Takeaways
- AI Overviews appear far more often for informational queries than commercial ones, protecting BOFU content — for now.
- 60% to 80% of content output should target bottom- and mid-funnel, with TOFU serving topical authority and internal linking.
- BOFU content's value is systematically underreported in traditional analytics — traffic is becoming a vanity metric.
- The practical shift: audit BOFU gaps, build comparison content with real methodology, retrofit TOFU with CTAs, and track LLM referrers in GA4.
The ONmetrics Take
AI search changes are real, but don't abandon traditional SEO.
1. AI Overviews cite sources — Be the best answer, not just an answer 2. Brand mentions matter — Get on Reddit, YouTube, industry pubs 3. First-party data wins — Your insights can't be AI-scraped
The bottom line: We've been telling London, Ontario businesses the same thing for years: traffic without revenue is a vanity metric. AI is just making it obvious. If your content strategy still chases search volume instead of buyer intent, you're optimizing for clicks that no longer come. The brands that win will be the ones showing up when someone's ready to buy — not when they're just browsing.