Google’s VP of Search, Liz Reid, gave a podcast interview to Bloomberg recently that’s been doing the rounds in SEO circles. The headline most people have latched onto: AI Overviews are filtering out “low-value clicks” while driving more searches overall. Liz says this is good news. And honestly? I think she’s partly right. But only partly – and the bit she’s glossing over matters quite a lot if you run a small B2B service business.
So let’s go through what she said, what it means, and what you should and shouldn’t be worrying about.
What Google means by a low-value click
Liz Reid’s description of a bounce click is worth quoting directly, because it’s more specific than the headlines suggest. She describes someone who clicks a result, sees the fact they needed, and immediately clicks back. Half a second on the page. Gone.
Her argument is that AI Overviews can just give those people the answer directly, which means they never click through in the first place – and that’s fine, because they weren’t going to stick around anyway.
And for a lot of websites, she’s right. If you’re a publisher running a recipe site and someone clicks through to find out how many grams are in an ounce, reads the number, and leaves, you haven’t lost a customer. You’ve lost a page view. Those aren’t the same thing.
But there’s a problem with applying this logic to B2B service businesses, and it’s a fairly significant one.
The bounce click looks different when you’re selling a service
When someone’s looking for, say, a commercial solicitor in Sheffield, or an independent financial adviser in Bristol, the journey rarely looks like Reid’s description. They’re not clicking to grab a single fact. They’re clicking to get a feel for whether you might be the right person to help them.
They might spend 90 seconds reading your about page and leave. By Reid’s metric, that could look like a bounce. By your metric, that person now knows who you are, what you do, and whether they like the sound of you. They might come back in three weeks when they’ve got budget sign-off. They might mention you to a colleague. They might type your name directly into Google the next time they’re ready to act.
None of that shows up in session data. None of it fits neatly into Google’s framework for what makes a click valuable.
I’ve written before about why ranking on Google still matters even when nobody clicks, and the same principle applies here. The value of a visit to a B2B service website often doesn’t cash out in the same session, and sometimes doesn’t cash out in a way that analytics can measure at all. Liz Reid is describing search behaviour through the lens of what Google can see. That’s not the same as what’s really happening.
Whose definition of “valuable” are we using here?
I think this is a question worth asking. Ms Reid’s illustration of a valuable click is someone buying shoes. The answer doesn’t buy the shoes, she says – you still have to click through to the merchant and complete the transaction.
That framing tells you something about how Google is thinking about this. Value means commercial intent that completes within the session. That’s an e-commerce definition. It fits Google’s ad model beautifully – clicks with purchase intent are the ones advertisers pay for, so those are the ones Google is motivated to preserve.
For most small B2B service businesses, your prospects don’t work that way. They don’t find you on Google at 11am and sign a contract by lunchtime. They research. They read. They come back. They ask around. The click that looks low-value to Google might be the first step in a relationship that eventually turns into a five-figure contract. You won’t see that in your bounce rate data. Google certainly won’t.
This doesn’t mean Liz is wrong about everything. But it does mean you should be sceptical of applying her framework to your business without thinking about whether it actually fits.
The thing she said that you should pay attention to
I think this is the more useful bit. Liz talked about how queries are getting longer and more natural, and this is something I’m seeing in client data too. People are searching in full sentences now. They’re describing their actual problem rather than compressing it into two or three keywords.
Instead of “employment solicitor Sheffield,” someone might type “my employee is claiming unfair dismissal and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do next.” Instead of “accountant small business Bristol,” it might be “do I need an accountant if I’m a sole trader turning over about £80k.”
That’s a real shift, and it’s actually good news for small B2B service businesses who’ve put effort into writing content that answers real questions in plain language. The era of compressing everything into keyword fragments is fading (thank goodness!). Google is getting better at understanding what someone means (search intent, anyone?), which means content written by someone who properly understands their clients’ problems is increasingly well-positioned.
If your content is specific, direct, and written for actual humans rather than for a search algorithm, you’re moving in the right direction. If it’s still full of “comprehensive solutions for businesses of all sizes,” you’ve got work to do.
So should you be worried?
If your website was previously getting a lot of traffic from people who wanted a quick fact and nothing else, then yes, some of those clicks will disappear. That’s probably fine – they weren’t going to become clients.
But if your worry is that AI Overviews are going to strip out the clicks that matter to your business – the ones where someone is genuinely sizing you up as a potential supplier – the evidence for that is much thinner than the headlines suggest. AI Overviews appear far less frequently on searches with clear commercial intent. Google knows that “find me a specialist [whatever] in [wherever]” is not a question that gets answered by a synthesised paragraph at the top of the page.
What this all points to, again, is the same thing I keep coming back to: focus on whether the right people are finding you and whether your website is doing its job when they arrive. If your traffic is thin, that matters. If your enquiry rate from the traffic you do get is low, that matters too – and those are different problems with different solutions, as I covered in the post on six website stats that tell you whether your SEO is working.
The clicks Google considers low-value and the clicks that are low-value to your business are not the same list. Keep that distinction in mind and the Liz Reid interview becomes a lot less alarming.
Want to know whether your website is actually reaching the people who’d hire you – and what happens when they get there? That’s exactly what we cover in an SEO 1:1. Book one and I’ll give you a straight answer.
