On May 14th 2024, Google released AI Overviews, which is their version of AI search.
We’ve been waiting for this moment for about a year. Since Google announced they’d be adding AI search features to search, we’ve been playing with the precursor to AI Overviews called SGE (Search Generative Experience) in Google’s testing mode inside Search Labs.
Now Google AI Overviews has launched, it has become apparent that there are some key differences to what we had been used to experimenting with in SGE.
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Briefly, we have found the keys to ranking your website in Google’s AI Overviews are:
- Extremely closely matching the information you publish with the phrase you are trying to rank for.
- Providing simple information with high readability.
- “Getting to the point” and giving the user the information they need very quickly on the page.
- Already ranking in the “regular” organic search results.
This guide will share a comprehensive breakdown of these factors, with examples.
What Is Google’s AI Overview?
The AI Overview is a new type of search engine from Google that uses generative AI to answer the searcher’s query, in addition to providing links to websites that “support” or “corroborate” the answer the AI gives.
It was in testing mode for much of 2023 under the name SGE, and was launched as AI Overviews in May 2024. At the time of writing it is only available in the USA, but can be accessed from other countries using a VPN set to the US.
An AI Overview search results page looks like this at the time of writing:
If you’re used to SGE, you’ll notice that AI Overviews is a bit of a scaled-back or throttled version of SGE.
The AI Overview sits above the “regular” organic search results.
The key components of an AI Overview result are:
- The answer provided by the generative AI
- Links to some websites that show related info
- Dropdown links to websites that corroborate the information in each part of the answer
Which Searches Trigger an AI Overview Result?
Currently, the AI Overview answers appear in various forms for different types of searches. Sometimes, the AI Overviews panel can be seen with a link to Show more buttons. This seems to be the current “default” way:
For some queries, an AI Overviews panel is visible by default. In this case, Google has created AI images to answer the searcher’s query:
In some cases, Google opts not to show an AI Overview answer or even give the searcher an option to create one, even if the old SGE did trigger an AI-generated result:
It’s common for Google to use this approach for searches relating to financial recommendations. Initially, Google said that AI-generated responses wouldn’t be available for “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL) searches. In our testing though, we’ve found plenty of SGE responses given for health and medical-related search queries. For example:
It is perhaps worth noting that Google has developed a medical-specific version of PaLM 2, the large language model powering the AI Overviews. This medical-specialist LLM (known as Med-PaLM 2) has been trained to give accurate medical advice.
It’s possible that Google is relying on this specialist version to provide answers to medical-related questions, which would explain why Google has the confidence to allow AI Overviews answers to questions which, if incorrectly answered, could lead to Google being guilty of sharing bad medical advice.
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How to Get Traffic from SGE
There are a couple of ways to get visibility for your business in Google’s AI Overviews. One of them can be seen in this search, featuring Exposure Ninja client CHAS:
You can get your website listed in the “carousel” links. We’re expecting these to receive the lion’s share of the organic traffic produced by SGE, as they are the only ones shown when the SGE answer loads.
The second way to benefit is to be listed as a link in one of the AI Overviews dropdowns. We’ve found that in the majority of cases, the websites listed in the carousel are the sites listed in the individual dropdowns.
Now, before I carry on, I want to preface this by saying that (at the time of writing) AI Overviews is still claiming to be in an experimental stage and is likely to improve and change as it progresses out of testing. The results of my tests (which are very positive, as you’ll soon read) are based on existing ranking factors.
Should the factors change, the team and I will continue to innovate and iterate our tests to ensure we’re ahead of the game and consistently ranking our clients in the AI Overviews results.
Step 1: Start from a Strong Base
Our tests have found that ranking in AI Overviews is much easier if you are already ranking in the “regular” organic results. This implies that AI Overviews use some of the same ranking signals as marketers and SEOs have been providing for many years.
Things like:
- High-authority topical backlinks
- Decent website speed
- Content quality
- Strong user experience.
… all seem to help here.
However, ranking in the “regular” organic results is NOT sufficient to necessarily get coverage in the AI Overview results, as you can see for this search, where the Exposure Ninja website was ranking #1 in the organic results but had no visibility in the AI Overviews results (this screenshot was taken back when we only had SGE to play with):
Following the changes described below, however, we were able to correct this:
But it’s important to note that AI Overviews ranking – particularly picking up the all-important first three carousel slots that are visible — can’t be relied on, just from doing “regular” SEO.
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Step 2: Providing Simple Information with High Readability
When you click on a website linked from AI Overviews, you’ll often notice the URL contains a hash (this is called a Text Fragment and currently used within regular Featured Snippets):
The most interesting bit is the bit that goes (with %20, the HTML code for “space” removed): text=A sponsored tag is a link attribute that indicates to avoid potential link scheme penalties.
This tells the browser which part of the page to highlight:
And this section of the page seems to inform the AI Overviews answer. In this particular case, the first paragraph of the AI Overviews answer is a direct rewrite of the highlighted passage:
One thing I noticed as I was studying AI Overviews results was that the passages highlighted in the linked websites were always short. This is because, even in a longer AI Overviews answer, the linked website was being used to support one particular point.
Having studied dozens of AI Overviews search results, I realised that these linked paragraphs seemed to predominantly be written in short sentences and straightforward language. AI Overviews also seemed to favour sentences and paragraphs that made a single point, rather than more complex paragraphs.
My working theory is that because AI Overviews is designed to provide short, easy-to-read answers, it needs to reference short, easy-to-read sentences to decrease the chances of summarising inaccurately or taking the point out of context.
Step 3: ‘Getting to the Point’ and Giving the User the Information They Need Very Quickly on the Page.
I previously hosted a webinar sharing a series of AI Overviews ranking “before and afters”. These are searches where the target website was ranking organically but wasn’t featured in the AI Overviews results.
In addition to the other steps mentioned here, the one thing I made sure of in every case was that the opening paragraph of the blog page neatly summarised the answer to the question or topic, as I had noticed many AI Overviews-ranking pages did.
We started doing this when featured snippets first appeared in the search results, so it felt like a blast from the past.
In this example, the Exposure Ninja website wasn’t ranking in the AI Overview result for the search “sponsored tag”, despite ranking at position one in the regular organic results.
To attempt to correct this, I added the following paragraph at the top of the blog post. I wrote this to try and neatly summarise the answer to this question and give Google/AI Overviews the “support” it needed for its answer:
Within 12 hours of submitting this page via Search Console for re-indexing, we picked up a supporting link in the first paragraph of the AI Overviews answer and a coveted carousel spot:
In one test case, I noticed after adding a new summary paragraph at the start of the article that AI Overviews was still hashing and referencing a paragraph further down the page. This page was ranking in the AI Overviews carousel, but outside the top three.
It was annoying that AI Overviews was referencing the old paragraph, as I really didn’t feel that it was as good a summary as the new one I had written.
Our CEO, Charlie, suggested removing the old paragraph altogether in case it was “confusing” AI Overviews. That worked. Within a matter of hours, the new paragraph was being referenced, and our AI Overviews carousel ranking went into the first three positions.
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Step 5: Submit Changes via Google Search Console
All of the tweaks and adjustments I’ve suggested can be ranked in AI Overviews in a matter of hours if you request re-indexing via Google Search Console. In my tests, unless I did this, I saw no improvement in the first two days. However, after requesting re-indexing, improvements were seen in some cases within five hours.
Just drop the URL into your Google Search Console inspect bar at the top of the page:
Then, once it’s loaded, tap Request Indexing.
Thoughts on AI Overviews Ranking
As you can see, AI Overviews ranking can be fairly simple to influence. Not easy, because it’s not easy ranking in the first place. But simple because there is a process to follow.
In researching the AI Overviews ranking factors, I tried looking for all sorts of correlations including the authority of the authors, volume and quality of inbound links, content length, page load times, presence of images and videos…
In the end, it seems to be more about the structure of the content on the page, combined with some “regular” SEO ranking factors. Thus AI Overviews is more like an evolution of the search engines we are used to working with than an entirely new beast with unrecognisable rules.
Google’s next-generation LLM Gemini, due any day now, is the elephant in the room. Google may be waiting for Gemini to power SGE before rolling it out to the public, in which case we may see a radically different (and hopefully even better) experience.
But will the ranking factors of Gemini-powered AI Overviews be any different? I’m not so sure. Google’s search ranking algorithm is the primary source of the fortune that it has built, and if they could think of better ways to rank information shared on websites, they would probably be using them already for the 8 Billion searches processed every day.
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Thoughts on AI Overviews more broadly (and my big concern)
It seems obvious to me that AI Overviews uses a similar approach to Bing Chat when it’s compiling its answers:
- Parse the searcher’s query into something simple
- Run the search in the background, with some slightly different ranking criteria
- “Rewrite” the top results and provide links to the sources of the information.
This process is very transparent in Bing Chat:
But with AI Overviews, Google has rather obviously shied away from referring to the links as “citations” or “references”. Instead, they always speak about the websites “supporting” or “corroborating” the answer given by the AI.
The implication to me is that the AI produces an answer first, which it then seeks to verify and provide links that back up what it has said, NOT that it is taking or rewriting content from the websites it links to.
I can understand why they’d want to avoid the perception that AI Overviews is rewriting or even copying text from websites. After all, Google is frequently in legal hot water with publishers and is subject to various antitrust lawsuits.
But, from my observations, at least, copying and rewriting is EXACTLY what Google’s AI Overviews is doing. The websites listed don’t just corroborate the AI-written answer — it seems clear to me that they are the source.
Three pieces of evidence lead me to this conclusion:
- The frequency with which parts of the AI Overviews answers match exactly – or very closely – to the text on one of the linked websites
- The demonstration I detailed where it was possible to change AI Overviews’ answer with a single blog post. If AI Overviews was not copying the information from this page and was using a more traditional LLM to create these answers from scratch, a new blog post would surely not have been sufficient to change the answer like this
- The speed at which these changes happen. LLMs take days, weeks, or months to train. AI Overviews responses can be altered in a matter of hours.
Thus it seems likely to me that this version of AI Overviews is going to prove problematic for Google in the courts unless it drives significant organic traffic to the websites it links to. Publishers won’t be happy with Google scraping and sharing their content if this behaviour coincides with a precipitous drop in organic traffic.
Download our AI Overviews checklist to make sure you’re doing everything you should be to rank in AI Overviews. (There’s a printer-friendly version in the download, too.)
