AI Overviews
AI Overviews are short AI-written summaries that Google Search shows on some results pages, with links to web pages that back them up. Google says they help people get the gist of a complicated question fast, with links to learn more. Google shows one only when it decides the summary adds something to the regular results.
Source: Google Search Central, AI features and your website, checked October 29, 2026
What AI Overviews means for your business
Google first tested this in May 2023 as an opt-in experiment in Search Labs called Search Generative Experience, or SGE, and started showing AI Overviews to everyone in the US in May 2024. Older articles that say SGE mean the test version.
Google's guide for site owners says there are no extra requirements to show up in one. A page has to be indexed and allowed to show a snippet, the short preview text under a search result. So we'd start with the same basics as regular SEO. Google has to be able to crawl your pages. Each page should answer what your buyers ask, in plain words. And your Business Profile should be up to date.
Search Console now has a setting that takes your whole site out of AI Overviews and AI Mode, and a site that opts out gets no traffic or impressions from them while other sites keep showing up. The older noindex and nosnippet tags work page by page, but noindex hides the page from regular results and nosnippet hides its preview text there too. We'd almost never use any of them.
Search Console also has a generative AI report that counts how often your pages showed in AI Overviews and AI Mode. Clicks from these features still sit in the main Performance report with the rest of your Google traffic. If you're trying to work out how much of your buyers' searching now happens in AI tools, our research on AI search tracks which ones people use.
Last reviewed October 29, 2026. All terms
How AI answers it today
On October 29, 2026, Google's AI Overview on its own feature cited Wikipedia and SEO tool blogs plus two Google pages, but not Google's guide for site owners. ChatGPT, asked the same question, cited only Google's own help pages and that guide.
Our run through ChatGPT and Google's AI Overview, October 29, 2026. A sample, not what every buyer sees.
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