If your website has a calculator, a checker or any other little tool on it that brings people in from Google, Google has started building its own version of that tool inside the search results.
It’s called generative UI, and it means someone can now ask a question and get a working interactive thing built for them on the results page. Which means no clicking through to anybody’s website.
Google announced the latest stage of it on 19 August wrapped in a set of back-to-school features, so the examples are all pH scales and practice quizzes. That’s made it easy to file under “schools stuff, not my problem”.
It isn’t only schools stuff. Google has already built a mortgage calculator this way.
What generative UI in AI Overviews means
Generative UI builds a custom layout, and sometimes an interactive tool, on the spot for the question someone asked. It launched in AI Mode back in November alongside Gemini 3. It’s now live globally in English in AI Mode and has started rolling out into AI Overviews, which is the difference that matters. AI Mode is something people have to choose. AI Overviews appear on the ordinary results page whether anyone asked for them or not.
Google hasn’t said when the AI Overviews rollout finishes, which queries trigger it, or how often it shows up.
The education framing is a bit of a red herring. Google has already demonstrated a mortgage calculator built inside AI Mode, and Search Engine Journal’s coverage makes the point that this reaches well beyond study aids.
Google builds these tools from scratch rather than using yours
People are panicking, but I’m pretty sure they’re panicking about the wrong thing.
Generative UI produces a single web page with scripts, built from the query plus Google’s own search and image tools. Google’s research paper describes it as spinning up an instant design and engineering team to build an interactive experience in about a minute, for one specific prompt. The paper calls the results “ephemeral” – made for one question, then gone.
So nobody is scraping your calculator. Google is building a new one.
Which changes the question you should be asking.
It isn’t whether you’ve got a tool page. It’s whether your tool does anything Google can’t work out on its own.
Formula-based tool pages are the ones to worry about
The easiest tools to rebuild are the ones that take generic inputs and run public maths on them. A VAT calculator. Mortgage repayments. A unit converter. Google could always do those sums, and now it’ll do them with a slider, inside the answer, without anyone visiting your website to get the number.
Google’s own research gives some idea of how that goes down with users. Shown a generated interface next to the top-ranking search result for the same prompt, participants preferred the generated interface in 90% of comparisons. On a second set of prompts built around information-seeking queries it still won 73.5% of the time, against 19% for the top result.
Before that number does the rounds on LinkedIn without its caveats: the main prompts came from a chatbot evaluation platform, so they read more like chatbot requests than searches. And Google is marking its own homework, so we can’t rule out bias.
Tool pages built on your own data are harder for Google to copy
Tools that rely on data Google hasn’t got, or on a logged-in workflow, or on an integration with something outside the page, sit in a different position.
Google can’t generate your regional pricing benchmarks. It can’t generate your sector’s compliance thresholds or the cost assumptions you’ve built from ten years of your own project data. It doesn’t have the input data from your proprietary info.
That boundary won’t hold forever. Google previewed mini apps and dashboards at I/O in May, so the distance between a one-off generated page and a proper standing tool is already narrowing. For now though, it’s the most useful question to hold your own tool page up against. Is it doing maths anybody could do, or is it doing something only your business knows?
Was your calculator bringing in clients or just traffic?
A lot of B2B service businesses were talked into building a free calculator or checker as a lead magnet, usually by someone who’d read that tool pages attract links. And plenty of those tools brought in traffic. Far fewer brought in enquiries.
So before you worry about losing the page, go and find out whether it was earning its keep. Pull the queries that land on it in Search Console, look at what people did next in GA4, and then check your own enquiry records for anyone who arrived that way.
If the answer is a healthy pile of sessions and no clients, this rollout is taking a number off your dashboard rather than money out of your business. (That’s a question worth asking about every page on your site, not just the ones with a calculator on them – I’ve written about which website stats tell you whether your SEO is working if you want somewhere to start.)
What to do about generative UI on your website
Make a list of the tools on your site, if you have any. Sort them into ones a generated page could rebuild from public information and ones that need data only you hold. Then work out which of those pages earn their traffic because of the tool rather than because of the writing around it. That’s your list of exposed pages, and you can check it against your Search Console numbers over the next quarter.
For most B2B service businesses reading this, nothing will change, because you haven’t got a tool page. If your website is pages about the work you do and the people you do it for, Google building a pH scale visualisation for a sixth-former isn’t going to affect you.
But if you have got a calculator sitting there not earning its keep, then you’d be better off spending time on the pages on your website that bring you actual work than trying to stage a fight you won’t win with Google’s shiny new toy.
Not sure which of your pages are pulling their weight? Book an hour with me and we’ll go through your website together – what’s earning enquiries, what’s just making up numbers, and what to do about it.
