AI Overviews is rolling out to all US searchers on Google Search, making AI Overviews available to hundreds of millions of searchers next week, Liz Reid, the company’s new head of search, announced at Google I/O. AI overviews will be rolling out to more countries soon and will be available to more than a billion users by the end of the year.
Hema Budaraju, Senior Director of Product, Search Generative Experience, Google, told us that link cards in AI Overviews generate a higher click-through rate than traditional web search results. However, Google will not break down impressions and click data for AI overview links in Google Search Console.
In addition to the AI overviews, Google is rolling out new AI features from Search Labs, including multi-step reasoning capabilities, planning capabilities, AI-organized search results, and a new question feature with video from Google Lens.
What are AI overviews? AI overviews were introduced as part of the generative search experience in May 2023. It was enabled within Google’s search labs, until Google began testing AI overviews in state wild for a subset of users in March 2024.
AI Overviews provides answers to queries using generative AI technology powered by Google Gemini. He provides a few answer fragments based on his understanding of the queries and the content he has found on the topic on the web.
Here’s a GIF of what AI overviews look like in Google Search:
Limited inquiries. You won’t see AI overviews for all your searches. Budaraju told us that AI overviews are reserved for answering more complex questions where Google believes it can add value beyond search results. If the AI overview doesn’t add value to what Google Search shows by default, Google won’t show an AI overview.
Google would not say what percentage of queries will generate an AI overview. I asked many times and was told, “We won’t share those numbers.”
I asked if we could only see the AI overviews when no ads are showing, and was told no. Budaraju said the types of queries that AI overviews will show are “less about ads” and more about adding value to search results. Reid he wrote“As always, ads will continue to appear in dedicated spaces across the page, with clear labeling to distinguish between organic and sponsored results.”
Google can show AI Overviews for health, medical and financial queries – YMYL (Your Money, Your Life) queries.
A recent study concluded that Google is showing fewer AI overviews since testing began a year ago. Also, Onley shared similar data showing AI overviews appearing far less often recently.
clicks We speculated that when Google releases AI Overviews and SGE (by the way, AI Overview graduated to SGE and Labs, so we should call these AI Overviews and not SGE, Google told me), that Google would only release them for inquiries that would not. harm ad performance and revenue.
Budaraju told us that the click-through rate on AI Overview link cards is actually higher than the click-through rate on regular web results, similar to what we saw for featured snippets, he said.
General AI impressions in Search Console. Google will begin reporting AI Overview impressions and clicks in its Search Console reports, but will not distinguish between those generated by traditional search and AI Overview. Google will bundle them all, Budaraju said. There will be no way to see if your site has only been referred to AI overviews, if there has only been an impression for AI overviews, and a click only on AI overviews AI.
This approach is similar to Microsoft’s use of Copilot in Bing Search, formerly known as Bing Chat. Bing Webmaster Tools grouped Copilot impressions and clicks with regular web search clicks. Here’s how Google handles showing (or not showing) featured snippets in Search Consoledespite creating one filter it in 2016 but never releasing it to the public.
To me, this makes me feel like Google (and Bing) is hiding something from content creators. Clicks and CTR for these AI-based responses may not generate a healthy click-through rate for publishers. I mean, why else wouldn’t they show these details?
When AI overviews go wrong. Like any new technology, things can go wrong. We recently saw AI Overviews advising you drink urine to pass a kidney stone, Google removed this answer within 24 hours. In the past, we’ve seen examples of old highlights getting it wrong.
Searchers can report harmful and inaccurate AI overviews by clicking the three dots at the top of the AI overview. The results of AI overviews are likely to improve over time, showing less inaccuracies, just like we saw with highlights when they were first released.
disable Since AI overviews are a search feature, the only way to disable your site from appearing in AI overviews is through the normal search controls. This means blocking your site from showing up in Google Search entirely, either through robots.txt, meta tag controls, or other means.
Google has added a help document describing ways you can try to keep your content from appearing in AI overviews. Google wrote: “AI overviews provide a preview of a topic or query based on a variety of sources, including web sources. As such, they are subject to search preview controls.”
Searchers have no way to opt out of these AI Overviews at this time.
Highlights Highlights will not disappear. They will continue to appear in search results even with these new AI overviews. Some thought that AI Overviews would replace Featured Snippets, but at this point, Google told us that Featured Snippets will continue to appear in Google Search results.
Announcements Google Ads will host its Google Marketing Live (GML) event on May 21. I’m sure they’ll be announcing a lot of ad-based features at that time (more on GML here).
“Innovation and improvements to the user experience in Search have historically opened up new opportunities for advertisers. We saw that when we successfully navigated from desktop to mobile,” a Google spokesperson told Search Engine Land. Google expanded: “As we use generative artificial intelligence to expand the types of questions we can help people with and deliver new intent in Search, we see that this also opens up new opportunities for ads to be useful and companies connect with customers”.
Google also said that “People find ads above or below AI Overviews useful. And we’re continuing to experiment with new ad formats, including search and shopping ads, alongside search results to AI overviews.”
Why we care Like it or not, AI overviews are rolling out to search engines this week in the US and in more countries later this year. Will it always be perfect? No, but this is the next evolution of Google Search.
Google has been testing them for the past year, telling us they served billions of queries using generative AI. The company claims that people are clicking on a greater variety of websites thanks to AI Overviews, and that users “love the answers” they provide.
“All of this is made possible by a new Gemini model customized for Google Search. It brings together Gemini’s advanced capabilities, including multi-step reasoning, planning and multimodality, with our best-in-class search systems,” he said Reid.
And there’s more to come. Google added a bunch of new AI features to Google Search Labs, including:
Multi-step reasoning capabilities Planning capabilities in Google Search AI-organized search results from Google Lens Ask with video
You can learn more about these new features here.
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