AI Overviews

AI Overviews are the AI-generated summaries Google shows at the top of some search results, with links to the pages the summary draws on. They appear when Google’s systems judge that a generated answer would help, which is more often for longer, multi-part questions than for simple navigational searches.

How pages get into an AI Overview

Google’s documentation says there is no special markup or separate opt-in: pages become eligible by being indexed and eligible to appear as a snippet, and the usual controls (noindex, nosnippet, max-snippet) apply. In practice the pages that get linked are the ones whose passages answer the question directly, so the same work that earns a featured snippet applies here.

How to measure it

Search Console’s Generative AI performance report counts impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode, by page, country, device and date. It reports impressions only, not clicks. It does not say which page was quoted, so we pair it with sampled prompts in the Lab to see whether a site is actually cited.

What we do not claim

No one can promise an appearance in an AI Overview. We treat it as a measurable outcome, nothing more.