GEO glossary

AI Overviews

AI Overviews are AI-generated summaries that Google shows at the top of some search results pages. They answer the query in a few paragraphs or a list and link to the web pages used as sources, so a page can be cited without ranking first.

Reviewed by Gareth Hoyle, Managing Director
Last reviewed 31 October 2026

When did AI Overviews launch?

Google began rolling AI Overviews out to everyone in the US on 14 May 2024, after testing generative answers in Search Labs. On 15 August 2024 it expanded them to the UK, India, Japan, Indonesia, Mexico and Brazil. On Alphabet's Q2 2025 earnings call in July 2025, Sundar Pichai said AI Overviews had more than 2 billion monthly users, across 200 countries and territories.

Why it matters

AI Overviews change how many clicks a ranking is worth. Ahrefs compared 300,000 keywords in March 2024 and March 2025 and found the top-ranking page had a 34.5% lower average click-through rate when an AI Overview appeared. Google's position is that clicks from AI Overviews are higher quality, with visitors more likely to spend longer on the site.

Ranking still affects selection. In a July 2025 study of 1.9 million citations, Ahrefs found 76% of pages cited in AI Overviews ranked in the top 10. A larger rerun reported in March 2026 put the figure at 38%, though Ahrefs had changed its parsing method, so the two numbers are not directly comparable.

How to appear in AI Overviews

Google says there are no additional requirements or special optimisations for AI Overviews. A page needs to meet the normal technical requirements for Search: crawlable, indexable and returning a 200 status code. Traffic from AI features is included in the Web search type of the Search Console Performance report rather than shown separately.

We find that cited passages usually answer one narrow question in a sentence or two that still makes sense when read out of context.

Example

For the query 'how long does a boiler service take', an AI Overview might give a time range, list what the engineer checks and cite a manufacturer guide, a trade body page and a heating company's blog. The heating company is visible in the answer even if it sits fifth in the organic results.