Search Engine Land reports that Google AI Overviews now show up on 14 percent of shopping queries, based on a dataset of 20.9 million SERPs. That is a meaningful shift because shopping and product-intent traffic used to be one of the safest areas for affiliate content, review pages, and comparison funnels.  

For traffic arbitrage, the problem is obvious. The more product-intent queries get answered directly in the SERP, the fewer users make it to affiliate pages. That does not kill SEO, but it does make lazy evergreen page farming weaker as a model. Pages now need stronger differentiation, fresher updates, and better on-page monetization if they want to hold value.  

The practical read is straightforward: affiliate SEO is getting less passive. If shopping queries are no longer “safe,” then search projects need to behave more like media products, with faster refresh cycles, sharper intent matching, and conversion paths that do more with less traffic.