AI Overviews
Google's AI-generated summary at the top of some results. You can be cited but not paid for placement, and only if you're indexed.
AI Overviews are the AI-generated summaries Google shows above the traditional results for some queries. The overview stitches together an answer from multiple web pages and links out to a few of them as sources. For informational searches this can push the classic blue links further down the page.
There is no way to buy your way into an AI Overview and no dedicated markup that forces inclusion. Google draws overview sources from pages it already crawls, indexes and considers reliable for the topic, so the prerequisites are the ordinary ones: be indexable, be clearly about the query, and demonstrate real experience and expertise (E-E-A-T). Pages that already rank well and answer the question cleanly are the ones most likely to be pulled in.
Treat AI Overviews as a visibility surface to measure rather than a lever to pull. Track whether your pages get cited for the queries you care about; the way to influence it is to be the best available source, not to chase a formatting hack.
Related terms
- AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) — Structuring content so answer engines can lift a direct answer from it — for featured snippets, voice results and AI answers.
- E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust) — Google's quality framework: content should show real experience, expertise, authority and trust. Not a score, but a lens.
- GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) — Improving how often generative AI answers (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini) cite your site. Visibility is measured, not bought.
- Indexing — Storing a crawled page in a search engine's index so it can appear in results. Crawled is not the same as indexed.