Google AI Overviews now appear above the traditional results for a meaningful share of informational B2B queries in India, summarising an answer directly on the results page and, in many cases, reducing the click-through rate to the pages it draws from. For Indian B2B marketers, this changes the strategic question from "how do I rank number one" to "how do I make sure the summary is accurate, favourable, and still drives a click when it matters."
Overviews appear most consistently on definitional and comparative queries ("what is X", "X vs Y", "how does X work") and far less consistently on narrow, decision-stage, or highly localised queries ("call quality audit vendor for an NBFC in Pune"). This means the top-of-funnel content in a B2B library is more exposed to the zero-click effect than the bottom-of-funnel, high-intent content that actually drives pipeline — which is a reason to treat this as an opportunity to reallocate content effort rather than purely a threat.
For broad, top-of-funnel queries where an Overview is unavoidable, the realistic goal shifts from "get the click" to "be the source the Overview cites," since a citation still carries brand-visibility and trust value even without a click, and some Overview citations do drive clicks from users who want more depth.
Decision-stage, comparison, and highly specific queries remain the highest-ROI content investment, both because they still drive traditional clicks reliably and because they are exactly the queries a buyer asks right before a sales conversation.
Interactive tools, calculators, downloadable frameworks, and original data are harder for a generative summary to fully substitute for, which preserves a reason for the buyer to click through even when an Overview is present.
Indian B2B teams that have historically over-invested in broad, awareness-stage content to chase traffic volume are the most exposed to this shift, because that is precisely the content category Overviews summarise most completely. Reallocating a larger share of content budget toward decision-stage material, and treating awareness content primarily as a citation and brand-visibility play rather than a traffic play, is the practical adjustment most consultants are now recommending to clients.
The metric to watch: track click-through rate by query intent category (awareness vs decision-stage), not as a single site-wide number. A falling overall CTR that is concentrated entirely in awareness-stage queries is a very different situation from one that is bleeding into decision-stage traffic, and the two require completely different responses.