New Google AI Overviews Documentation & SEO

“AI Overviews appear in Google Search results when our systems determine …when you want to quickly understand information from a range of sources, including information from across the web and Google’s Knowledge Graph.”

Google published new documentation about their new AI Overviews search feature which summarizes an answer to a search query and links to webpages where more information can be found. The new documentation offers important information about how the new feature works and what publishers and SEOs should consider.

What Triggers AI Overviews

AI Overviews shows when the user intent is to quickly understand information, especially when that information need is tied to a task.

What Kinds Of Sites Does AI Overviews Link To?

An important fact to consider is that just because AI Overviews is triggered by a user’s need to quickly understand something doesn’t mean that only queries with an informational need will trigger the new search feature. Google’s documentation makes it clear that the kinds of websites that will benefit from AI Overviews links includes “creators” (which implies video creators), ecommerce stores and other businesses. This means that far more than informational websites that will benefit from AI overviews.

The new documentation lists the kinds of sites that can receive a link from the AI overviews:

“This allows people to dig deeper and discover a diverse range of content from publishers, creators, retailers, businesses, and more, and use the information they find to advance their tasks.”

Where AI Overviews Sources Information

AI Overviews shows information from the web and the knowledge graph. Large Language Models currently need to be entirely retrained from the ground up when adding significant amounts of new data. That means that the websites chosen to be displayed in Overviews feature are selected from Google’s standard search index which in turn means that Google may be using Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).

RAG is a system that sits between a large language model and a database of information that’s external to the LLM. This external database can be a specific knowledge like the entire content of an organization’s HR policies to a search index. It’s a supplemental source of information that can be used to double-check the information provided by an LLM or to show where to read more about the question being answered.

The section quoted at the beginning of the article notes that AI Overviews cites sources from the web and the Knowledge Graph:

“AI Overviews appear in Google Search results when our systems determine …when you want to quickly understand information from a range of sources, including information from across the web and Google’s Knowledge Graph.”

What Automatic Inclusion Means For SEO

Inclusion in AI Overviews is automatic and there’s nothing specific to AI Overviews that publishers or SEOs need to do. Google’s documentation says that following their guidelines for ranking in the regular search is all you have to do for ranking in AI Overviews. Google’s “systems” determine what sites are picked to show up for the topics surfaced in AI Overviews.

All the statements seem to confirm that the new Overviews feature sources data from the regular Search Index. It’s possible that Google filters the search index specially for AI Overviews but offhand I can’t think of any reason Google would do that.