AI Overviews
What are AI Overviews?
AI Overviews are the answers Google writes above its search results for some queries, with a few sources linked beside them. Each one is assembled from web pages at the moment of the search, so the same question can produce a different answer on a different day. There is no separate ranking: to be cited, a page has to be indexed and eligible to appear with a snippet in ordinary results.
Example
An office cleaning company has a page answering how often an office should be cleaned. For two months Search Console shows 9,000 impressions and 340 clicks on it — a rate of 3.8%. Over the next two months impressions rise to 12,000 while clicks fall to 260, a rate of 2.2%.
Looking at the query itself explains it. A generated answer now sits above the results, listing three cases and linking four sources, one of which is this company’s page. Some people take the answer and never click; others click precisely because they saw the name.
The conclusion is not that the page got worse. It is that for this kind of question the number with weight behind it moves: from clicks towards whether you are among the sources cited, and whether the page people do reach turns them into an enquiry.
Why it matters for a business
Informational questions increasingly get answered on the results page itself. This is uneven: searches with buying intent — a brand, a model, “cost”, “near me” — still produce clicks. The loss falls on general questions, and the gain is the citation: your name sits inside the answer somebody is reading.
It also changes reporting. Impressions and clickthrough rate on question-shaped queries have to be read together, or an ordinary shift looks like a collapse.
How to improve it
- Answer the question in the first two paragraphs, with concrete figures and conditions — that is the passage a machine can use.
- One question per page; long guides are rarely quoted whole.
- Structured data for the organisation, the services and the questions.
- Track question queries separately, where a falling clickthrough rate is to be expected; impressions inside AI answers have a report of their own in Search Console.
- If you would rather not take part, the snippet controls (nosnippet, max-snippet) keep your text out — but they also remove the snippet under your title in ordinary results.
Giving search engines and assistants something worth quoting is part of the SEO we run.