[This blog was updated in January 2025]
I know, I know - another acronym.
AIO stands for Artificial Intelligence Overview, and it’s Google's newest way to answer searchers' questions. Instead of sending searchers to a website with the answer, Google's AI Overviews pull out the answer and present it right on the search results page without the website ever getting a click.
Google accounts for about 95% of web traffic, and AI Overviews are a major change in how Google works, so it makes sense that website owners are worried.
Should the self storage industry be worried too?
There is no magic SEO formula.
AI Overviews are the newest development in self storage SEO.
Instead of serving up a page of ten links, Google is experimenting with using AI to directly answer the questions people are searching.
Google has been moving in this direction for a long while. Google will often pull a relevant paragraph (hopefully) from a blog and highlight the relevant text, linking to that blog.
AI Overviews are a further evolution of that practice. Instead of pulling a snippet from a relevant website, Google’s AI will use information from websites to answer the question in a conversational format.
Searchers will then be able to ask further questions, or follow the chatbot in a different direction entirely, their query answered without ever clicking on a link.
That’s why web devs are getting nervous. If Google’s AI answers someone’s question without sending them to a specific site, sites can’t sell ads or make sales - lots of websites can’t make money if no one clicks on them!
You can read Google’s AI Overview breakdown here.
Self storage isn’t like other industries, though. Our websites don’t make money by selling ads or sponsoring links.
Self storage websites make money by renting storage units - and AI overviews can’t rent anyone a storage unit (yet!).
Google’s new AI Overviews will affect pretty much every business that has a website - so pretty much every business.
Yes, AIO will affect self storage, but hopefully not by much.
Quick SEO Lesson:
Google gives different results depending on what it thinks the searcher is looking for.
If the searcher wants to learn something, that’s an informational query. Google will give blogs, news sites, or (now) AIO results to answer that question.
If the searcher wants to purchase a product or service, that’s a transactional query. Google will give shopping site results or, if the search is local (ie, can’t be delivered to your house), Google will give Local Pack results.
Storage facilities get renters from the local pack. As long as you're showing up on the map, your renters should still find you.
If someone is trying to rent a storage unit, an AI Overview can’t help them. Google will send the searcher to storage websites instead.
Now, if your website currently has a popular blog, you're going to see a dip in visitors. And if that informational content was converting visitors into rentals, you could see a corresponding dip in rentals.
This is not the case for the vast majority of storage websites.
You may have already seen your traffic dip with the rollout of AI Overviews, but that should not affect your unit rentals. If someone is ready to make a purchase, Google will still be sending them to a quality self storage website.
If your website is in the top three of local results, you can still expect to get your share of renters.
Note: There have been some serious market headwinds over the last year, and some areas are seeing demand falling. This is not because of AI Overviews - we've yet to see their impact fully.
For a more in-depth look, check out our Self Storage SEO Round-Up for 2025.
You can find marketers and SEO experts all over the place telling you exactly what you need to do for AIOs, but this is all brand new. We can make some educated guesses as to what AI Overviews will bring, but anyone who promises to make your website show up in these AI results is exaggerating (or worse).
If you had a well-designed website before AI Overviews, don’t panic and don’t make any big changes.
Google, notoriously tight-lipped, put out an entire presentation on the subject of SEO. The message was this: Don’t chase Google’s algorithm when you know where it’s going!
Google is one of the biggest, most powerful companies on the planet, and their top-tier engineers are using the best and newest technology. Smaller companies (like storage operators) have little hope of keeping up with the incredibly complicated metrics Google uses to decide which sites rank well.
Luckily, you don’t need to! Google wants to give searchers what they are looking for. All a good storage website needs to focus on is being a good solution to the customer's problems.
AI Overviews are exactly the same.
Don’t spend too much time or energy wondering how the latest AI large language models are going to parse your content, and what sort of snippets might get a customer to convert.
Even if you manage to capture the AI's attention for a storage-related topic, AI Overviews aren’t going to funnel you any rentals. Information is global, and your customers come from within ten minutes of your store.
Google’s AI Overviews are the next step on the path Google has been following all along.
It’s not like going from a car to a plane - it’s more like going from a gas car to a hybrid. Unless you’re a gas station, you won’t notice much change.
AI uses the same ranking signals that modern self storage SEO does because those ranking signals are how humans communicate their preferences.
Reviews, purchases, photos, time on site - whether it's an AI or Google’s pre-existing algorithms, these factors differentiate between a useful site and a less-useful one.
No. AIOs will play a limited role in transactional queries and should not significantly impact the number of rentals your website brings in.
Looking to learn more? Check these out!
At StoragePug, we build self storage websites that make it easy for new customers to find you and easy for them to rent from you.
