What are AI Overviews?
According to Google, AI Overviews are designed to help people get to the gist of a complicated topic or question more quickly and to provide a jumping-off point to explore links. Google shows them only for queries where, in its own assessment, they add something beyond the classic results.
An AI Overview consists of a generated answer and linked sources. Below it, the usual results follow on the search engine results page (SERP). A separate area for longer conversations with Search is AI Mode.
Rollout in the US and Germany
- United States: on 14 May 2024, Google announced that AI Overviews would begin rolling out to everyone in the US, giving hundreds of millions of users access that week (Google blog).
- Further countries: from August 2024, AI Overviews expanded beyond the US (Google blog, October 2024).
- Germany: on 26 March 2025, AI Overviews launched in Germany alongside countries including Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Spain and Poland. At launch, the feature was limited to signed-in users aged 18 and over (Google blog Germany, in German).
How AI Overviews select sources
According to Google, AI Overviews may use a technique called query fan-out: the system issues several related searches across subtopics and identifies more pages that support the answer. Google says this allows it to show a wider and more diverse set of links than a classic web search.
The requirements are the same as for regular Search, according to Search Central: a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown with a snippet. New machine-readable files, AI text files or special schema markup are not needed.
Controls: snippet rules and Search Console
If you want to limit which content appears in AI Overviews, Google points to the familiar rules nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet and noindex. These, however, also affect the regular search results.
Since 2026, Search Console has also offered a dedicated setting under Settings > Search generative AI, available to all websites worldwide since 31 August 2026 (Search Console Help). It lets you exclude a property from the generative AI features in Search. Google stresses that this setting is not used as a ranking signal for other search results and does not affect AI training. For training, Google refers to Google-Extended.
Measuring AI Overviews
Google Search Console counts clicks and impressions from AI Overviews within the “Web” search type in the Performance report (Search Central). Clicks cannot be filtered out separately there. Google Analytics cannot reliably separate visits from AI Overviews from other organic Google visits either.
A newer addition is the Generative AI performance report (Search Console Help). It shows how often links to your site were shown in AI features in Google Search, broken down by page, country, device and date. It contains impressions but no clicks. Google introduced it on 3 June 2026, initially for a subset of websites, and according to the help page it has been available to all websites worldwide since 31 August 2026.
Google states that clicks from results pages with AI Overviews are of higher quality because users spend more time on the site. This cannot be verified from the outside. Your own data is more reliable: click-through rate and engagement of your most important pages over time.
What AI Overviews mean for websites
For queries with an AI Overview, a website competes not only for positions but also for a place among the linked sources. Good prerequisites are indexable, well-structured content with clear answers and up-to-date facts. Because the answer often appears on the results page itself, your brand should be represented correctly in the answer text. We check whether and how that works through AI monitoring and in a GEO audit.
Would you like to appear as a source in AI Overviews with your pages and need support? Then get in touch or read more about our AI SEO service! Would you like to find out more or have your team trained on this topic? Then take a look at our GEO seminar.
