Pick Your Battles: The New SEO and PPC Playbook

For most organisations running digital marketing, the question of how to split budget and effort between SEO and paid search has always had a fairly intuitive logic to it. SEO for the long game, for brand-building and authority. PPC for the immediate return, for the terms where you need to show up now and where the commercial intent is high enough to justify the spend. Two channels with distinct purposes, broadly distinct skill sets, and a natural division of labour.

That logic is not wrong. But the arrival of AI overviews has introduced a complication that makes it significantly more important to be deliberate about how you apply it. Where you get it wrong, the cost is paid twice: once in wasted PPC budget, and again in missed organic opportunity.

AI Overviews are changing the rules

AI overviews are not appearing uniformly across search. Their distribution is heavily skewed towards informational and research queries, the kind of search where someone is trying to understand something rather than buy something. Categories like healthcare and finance see AI overviews in close to nine out of ten searches. Questions that start with "how", "what", "why" and "should" are particularly likely to return an AI-generated summary before a single organic listing or paid result.

For paid search, this creates a specific problem. A meaningful proportion of terms that advertisers have historically bid on, including category terms, informational queries and comparison searches, are now the very queries where AI overviews are most densely packed. Bidding on those terms in the current environment means competing for attention on a results page where the AI answer is absorbing most of it, and where the zero-click rate is at its highest. You are paying for exposure that is increasingly not leading to a click.

Transactional queries such as "buy", "near me", "pricing" and specific product or service searches remain more insulated from this dynamic. The reasons are structural: Google has a strong commercial incentive to protect ad inventory around high-intent searches, and the experience of clicking through to make a purchase or book a service is not yet something AI mode can fully replace. These are the terms where PPC still delivers a clean, high-value click from a user who is genuinely ready to act.

A more deliberate division of labour

The practical implication of this is that the division of labour between SEO and PPC needs to become more conscious and more closely tied to query type and user intent than it may have been in the past.

SEO is increasingly well-suited to informational and research queries. Not just because these are the terms where AI overviews are proliferating, but because presence in those AI overviews, specifically being cited as a trusted source within a summary, is now a vital component of impactful organic visibility. The brands that are establishing authority on these topics through well-structured, genuinely useful content are the ones who will benefit from that citation. Being cited in an AI overview for a research query is, for many businesses, more valuable than ranking seventh in a results list that many users will not scroll down to.

PPC, meanwhile, is best directed at the terms where purchase intent is explicit and immediate. The closer someone is to making a decision, the more a well-placed paid ad is worth. In this part of the funnel, the data we are seeing supports the case that higher CPCs are being offset by higher conversion rates. The users who make it through an AI overview and still click on a paid result are meaningfully more qualified than they were before AI overviews existed.

What this looks like in practice

In practical terms, the shift we are advocating is less about restructuring budgets dramatically and more about being clear-eyed about what each channel is doing and why.

Start by auditing the terms you are currently bidding on. For each term, ask: what is the likelihood that AI overviews are appearing on this query? Is this a research query or a transactional one? If a user sees an AI overview for this term, what are the chances they still click through? If the honest answer is that a term is informational in nature and is already well-covered by AI-generated results, that is a term where SEO effort and content investment will deliver better returns than paid spend.

For terms where the intent is clearly commercial and close to conversion, the case for PPC remains strong, and in some cases stronger than it was before, given the higher quality of the clicks that survive.

At Mentor, we run integrated search strategies that bring SEO specialists and PPC experts together around exactly this question. We believe that the two disciplines actively informing each other, rather than just running in parallel, is where real value lies. If you would like to talk through how a search strategy like this might work for your business, please don’t hesitate to contact us.