AI Overviews: What Are They & How to Optimize for Them

Google now answers some queries directly with AI Overviews that appear above other organic results.

For users, those AI-generated summaries mean faster answers. For website owners, it means a shift in how you earn and track your visibility.

This guide breaks down what AI Overviews are, how they work, and how you can optimize for them.

What Are AI Overviews?

Google’s AI Overviews are a type of highly prominent search feature that provides users with AI-generated answers to certain queries.

AI Overviews typically appear at the top of search results, although they sometimes appear below sponsored results and even unpaid results.

For example, if you search “how to lose weight,” Google will automatically generate an answer for you.

Google’s Gemini models generate AI Overview answers by gathering information from different sources on the web. The summary also contains links to these sources that users can click for more information.

Google’s goal with AI Overviews is to improve the search experience by giving users quick answers to their queries. So they don’t have to sift through multiple websites.

Google’s AI summaries were initially part of an experiment through Search Labs and included in a program called Search Generative Experience (SGE). After receiving positive feedback from users, Google made AI Overviews available to everyone in the U.S. on May 14, 2024.

When and Where Do AI Overviews Appear?

AI Overviews appear for a range of search queries and are available in over 200 countries and territories and in 40+ languages.

Not all searches trigger AI Overviews, even in supported countries. They’re selectively displayed based on query complexity and whether Google’s systems determine an AI-generated summary would genuinely help users.

While AI Overviews primarily appear for informational queries, recent Semrush research shows they’re becoming more common across navigational, commercial, and transactional queries. In fact, keywords triggering AI Overviews went from being 89.03% informational in October 2024 to just 57.16% informational in October 2025.

Why Are Google’s AI Overviews Important?

Google’s AI Overviews are important because they change how Google delivers information to users and how websites can gain visibility in search results.

AI Overviews diminish visibility for many websites and can lead to more zero-click searches that remove the need for users to click anything to find what they’re looking for. Which can decrease organic (unpaid) traffic to websites.

A Pew Research Center report suggests users click traditional search result links just 8% of the time when an AI Overview is present, versus 15% of the time when there’s no AI Overview present. And users only click results within the AI Overview 1% of the time.

But despite the potential impact on clicks, being mentioned in an AI Overview (even without a link to your site) does provide visibility for your brand. Rather than simply appearing as a normal organic result, your brand can be featured prominently right at the top of the search results.

Plus, the AI Overview can give searchers context about your brand without them having to explore further on their own. Like this example, which labels HubSpot as the best overall CRM for small businesses:

And when your site is linked as a source for the AI Overview’s answer, it helps position your brand as an authority.

Since AI Overviews often appear before the rest of the organic results, appearing in them as a source or being mentioned/recommended in the answer is important for your overall brand visibility.

How AI Overviews Work

AI Overviews work by summarizing information from a variety of sources and displaying this summary to searchers.

The content within AI Overviews is generated using advanced generative AI technology powered by Google’s Gemini large language models (LLMs). The summary the user sees is based on the AI’s understanding of the query and the relevant information it gathered across the web.

AI Overviews can also use a process called query fan-out. This involves the systems running multiple related searches to put together a more comprehensive response for the user.

The systems behind AI Overviews evaluate many signals—like content quality, source authority, and relevance—to determine what information to include. The next section explains how you can optimize your content for these signals.

How to Optimize for AI Overviews

To optimize content for AI Overviews, make your webpages crawlable and indexable, target long-tail keywords, create quality content, improve user experience, use on-page SEO techniques, and build backlinks and brand mentions.

Google’s official recommendation for optimizing for AI features like AI Overviews is to “apply the same foundational SEO best practices for AI features as you do for Google Search overall.”

So, if you’re already following SEO best practices, you're on the right track for being featured in AI Overviews as well.

1. Ensure Your Webpages Are Crawlable and Indexable

For any webpage to be considered for AI Overviews, it first needs to be both crawled and indexed by Google.

Crawling is the process Google uses to discover your pages. And indexing is when these pages are stored in a large database.

But there are some technical issues that can prevent crawling and indexing, including:

• Robots.txt file blocking access: This is a file that tells Google which pages or files it should or shouldn’t request from your site. If this file is blocking access to some of your pages, Google won’t crawl them.
• Noindex tags added by accident: These are meta robots tags that can be added to your pages’ HTML code to tell Google not to index those pages. If your pages have noindex tags, they won’t appear in search results or AI Overviews—even if you want them to.
• 4XX errors: These are HTTP status codes that indicate a page couldn’t be found or is unavailable. Common 4XX errors include 404 (not found) and 403 (forbidden). If some pages on your site have 4XX errors, Google won’t be able to crawl or index those pages.
• Poor site structure: This is how well your webpages are organized. If you don’t have a properly structured site, Google struggles to crawl all the pages efficiently, which may impact your visibility in AI Overviews.

Start with a free SEO check to quickly spot technical issues.

For a deeper dive into your site, use Semrush Site Audit.

Fixing the issues it identifies can improve your chances of appearing in AI Overviews.

2. Target Long-Tail Keywords

Optimizing your content for relevant long-tail keywords (highly specific queries) may improve your chances of appearing in AI Overviews given they’re designed to answer specific user questions.

Google even stated at the launch of AI Overviews that the AI summaries would “help with increasingly complex questions.”

You can see this in action for yourself by searching for a long-tail keyword like “best dog food for sensitive stomach”:

Users that search for these longer queries are typically looking for something specific.

If a highly specific query is relevant to your business, appearing in the AI Overview could drive targeted traffic to your website. Or at least put you on users’ radars to make them more likely to visit your website in the future.

3. Create Quality Content

Creating quality content gives you a higher chance of appearing in AI Overviews because Google's algorithms are designed to prioritize content that meets strict quality standards.

To meet Google’s quality standards, ensure you content is:

• Accurate: Fact-check thoroughly and cite reputable sources like industry reports, academic journals, and official documentation
• Original: Add unique value through original research, expert interviews, or unexplored angles on common topics
• Based on expertise: Involve subject matter experts in your content creation process. Or feature insights from people with real-world experience in the topic.
• Valuable to the user: Address your audience's actual questions and pain points to ensure you’re helping them solve their problems
• Easy to read: Use short sentences, stick to one idea per paragraph, and break up text with visuals and lists to improve readability for both users and Google
• Up to date: Meaningfully refresh your content when needed to ensure information stays accurate and relevant

4. Improve the User Experience

Google sees user experience (how enjoyable users’ interactions with your content are) as an important factor for determining how prominently to show different search results.

To optimize for the user experience, focus on the following key areas:

• Speed: Your content should load quickly, ideally within a few seconds. Longer loading times can lead to users leaving your site faster.
• Mobile-friendliness: Your content should be properly visible on mobile devices, without the need for zooming in or scrolling horizontally. Use a responsive design, so your content can automatically adjust to provide a seamless viewing experience on any device.
• Secure content access: Your users’ personal information should be secure when accessing your content. Use hypertext transfer protocol secure (HTTPS), which can encrypt their data.

5. Use On-Page SEO Techniques

Using on-page SEO practices that improve aspects of your webpages to help Google better understand your content makes your pages more likely to show for relevant queries—and potentially appear in AI Overviews.

Some key on-page factors include:

• Title tags: These are page titles that appear on browser tabs and can appear in traditional and AI search results. Include a page’s main keyword in the title tag, so Google knows what that page covers.
• Meta descriptions: These are brief descriptions that can appear beneath your pages' titles in traditional and AI search results. Make sure each page’s meta description is enticing enough to catch readers’ attention.
• URL slugs: These are the last parts of URLs that identify specific pages. Each page's URL slug should be short, descriptive, and incorporate the main keyword of that page.
• Heading tags (H1, H2s, H3s, etc.): These are headings that organize your content. Use your target keywords in them to help Google understand your content’s focus areas.
• Keywords: These are the search queries your content is focused around. Include relevant keywords throughout the content—but avoid stuffing them unnaturally.

6. Build Backlinks and Brand Mentions

Getting more backlinks and brand mentions from other websites increases your chances of showing in AI Overviews.

While brand mentions are less important for traditional SEO, they seem to be especially important for your AI visibility.

How to Get More Backlinks

You can build more backlinks by doing backlink outreach, which involves contacting other sites in your industry and requesting that they link to your content.

Another way to use the Backlinks tool is to find broken pages — pages on your competitors' sites that return errors. Site owners generally want to link to working content, so offering your resource as a replacement for a dead link is often an easy ask.

How to Build Brand Mentions

You can build brand mentions by reaching out to websites with ideas for how they can talk about you.

However, most brand mentions are picked up naturally. In other words, you’ll likely build brand mentions over time by simply creating great content and marketing your business.

How to Prevent Your Content from Appearing in AI Overviews

Some websites may want to prevent their content from being summarized and displayed in AI Overviews due to concerns around copyright, accuracy of summaries, or maintaining control over how their content is presented.

AI Overviews are a feature of Google search results, which means websites cannot directly opt out of them.

But there are some traditional SEO methods you can use to limit the chances of your pages appearing in AI Overviews:

• Use robots.txt to block Google: You can use your robots.txt file to tell Google not to crawl certain pages or sections of your website. While this won't necessarily stop those pages from being indexed, it reduces the likelihood that their content will be used in AI Overviews. But this will impact your overall search visibility—not just within AI Overviews.
• Use noindex tags: Add a noindex meta tag to your pages to instruct Google not to index that content at all. This ensures those specific pages won't appear in AI Overviews, but it also removes them from regular search results.
• Use nosnippet tags: The nosnippet meta tag prevents Google from generating a text snippet for your pages in standard search results. Using this tag should also stop that content from being summarized in an AI Overview. But like the other two methods, it can also impact your normal search visibility, too.

How to Check If Your Website Is Appearing in AI Overviews

Find out which of your pages are appearing in AI Overviews using Semrush’s Organic Rankings tool.

Enter your domain into Organic Rankings and go to the “ Positions” tab, then select the “ SERP Features” drop-down, hover over “Domain Ranks,” and click “ AI Overview.”

You’ll see the terms you appear in AI Overviews for, along with metrics like search volume, keyword difficulty, and more.