Definition
AI Overviews
Also known as: Google AI Overviews, formerly Search Generative Experience (SGE)
AI Overviews is a Google Search feature that shows an AI-generated summary at the top of some results pages, with links to the web pages the summary drew on. It launched to all US users in May 2024 after a year as the Search Generative Experience (SGE) experiment in Search Labs, and is fed by the same crawling and indexing as ordinary Search.
AI Overviews grew out of the Search Generative Experience (SGE), which Google opened as a Search Labs experiment in the United States on 10 May 2023. At Google I/O in May 2024 the feature was renamed AI Overviews and rolled out to everyone in the US, with other countries following. AI Mode, a separate conversational tab introduced in 2025, uses the same underlying approach.
Google's documentation for AI features describes both as using "query fan-out": the system issues several related searches, retrieves passages from the results, and composes a summary that links to the pages it used. There is no separate index and no separate crawler. Googlebot fetches the page, and the usual indexing and snippet rules decide what may be shown.
That has two practical consequences. First, the ordinary AEO work — an answer-first passage per question, clear entities, a visible author and date — is the whole optimisation; there is nothing extra to submit. Second, control is coarse. Google-Extended governs model training, not Search, so the only levers are nosnippet, max-snippet, data-nosnippet and noindex, which also change how the page appears in classic results. See controlling AI crawlers with robots.txt for the trade-offs, and zero-click search for why a citation in an overview may not produce a visit.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need special markup to appear in AI Overviews?
No. Google's documentation states that there are no additional requirements or special optimisations for AI Overviews or AI Mode, and no need for new machine-readable files or markup. A page has to be indexed and eligible for a snippet; the same content-quality guidance as ordinary Search applies.
Can I block AI Overviews without leaving Google Search?
Only partially. Google-Extended is a training opt-out for Gemini models and does not change how a page appears in Search. To limit what AI Overviews shows from a page, Google points to the standard preview controls — nosnippet, max-snippet, data-nosnippet — or noindex, all of which also affect ordinary results.