If you’re a regular user of ChatGPT, Claude, or another AI language model, you’ll know how great they are at finding information—just like search engines.
But did you know that for some queries, Google now uses generative AI in over 20% of its search results through a feature called AI Overviews? In this article, we’ll unpack what AI Overviews are, explore where Google is heading with them, and show you how to leverage this technology to boost your website’s visibility or advance your career as a digital marketer.
- What are AI Overviews?
- Aligning AI Overviews with Search Intent
- The impact of AI Overviews on SEO and for users
- How to optimize your content for AI Overviewsa
- Looking ahead: The potential and future developments of AI Overviews
What are AI Overviews?
AI Overviews are Google’s generative artificial intelligence summaries that appear prominently on search results—often before organic listings and sometimes even above ads. Unlike Featured Snippets, which extract sms services concise information from a single web page to answer a specific query, AI Overviews synthesize information from multiple sources to provide a more comprehensive summary. This approach offers users a broader understanding of their search topic without the need to click through multiple links.
These overviews leverage Google’s comprehensive understanding of the web and often include references to the web pages, such as the Digital Marketing Institute example in the image above, from where the information was sourced. Unlike conversational AI models like ChatGPT, there is no input box below the AI Overview for follow-up questions. Instead, AI Overviews are designed to deliver straightforward answers, allowing users to access the information they need at a glance.
From Code Red to AI Overviews: How Google responded
With the rapid rise of ChatGPT in late 2022, which offered a new way to search for information online, Google CEO Sundar Pichai declared a “Code Red,” prioritizing the enhancement of Google’s own AI capabilities.
In March 2023, Google introduced Bard, its experimental conversational AI chatbot, initially powered by the LaMDA language model. Two months later, in May 2023, Google launched the Search Generative Experience (SGE) for a select group of US users, offering results similar to what we now know as AI Overviews.
In early 2024, Google officially rebranded Bard as Gemini, reflecting the updated language model powering it. Soon after, they renamed SGE to AI Overviews, which many now abbreviate to AIO. This rebranding coincided with the global rollout of Google’s generative results. By October 2024, AIO had expanded to 100 countries, reaching over 1 billion users worldwide. However, at this time, AI Overviews have not been released to EU member countries because the EU is still deliberating on potential intellectual property infringement issues posed by AI-generated content
It’s clear that Google is taking generative AI seriously. Rather than viewing Bing and Yahoo as its main competitors, Google is now seeing AI models like ChatGPT and Claude as bigger threats as to where people are finding information.
” To see AI Overviews more often, make sure you log into your Google account. Different account types may show varying amounts of AI Overviews. In my case, my personal Gmail account displays more AI Overviews than my Google Workspace account. “
Aligning AIO with Search Intent
At the start, we mentioned that Google now uses generative AI in over 20% of its search results. This figure comes diversity and inclusion in digital marketing from Rich Sanger and Authoritas research, which analyzed 11,162 queries and found that AI Overviews appear in 21.1% of results on average across all search intent categories.
Let’s now examine a breakdown for the core search intent categories from two independent studies in September 2024, one by Rich Sanger and the other by Advanced Web Ranking:
It’s clear that AI Overviews appear across all core categories of search intent, but they are more likely to show up for informational queries.
You might wonder why the research by Rich Sanger and Authoritas (sample size of 11,162 queries) and Advanced Web Ranking (sample size of 8,000 queries) noticeably differ, with averages of 21.1% and 12.4% respectively. This turkey data discrepancy could stem from several factors: their methods of categorizing keywords, a potential bias towards informational queries in the websites they monitor, or the timing of their research. It’s worth noting that it was once reported that SGE affected 84% of queries when it launched. This number has been gradually decreasing—even more so since the rebranding to AI Overviews—as Google refines its understanding of when and where generative AI results are most useful.
To put things into perspective, SEO expert Mark Traphagen from seoClarity researched over 1 million keywords and found that over 96% of AI Overviews appear for queries with informational user intent.
