Google AI Overviews bring AI answers into Google Search: people see them without opening a separate AI app. Whether your business is named or linked as a source in them is part of your AI visibility.
Google tested the feature in Search Labs, its program for experiments, starting in May 2023 under the name Search Generative Experience (SGE). On May 14, 2024, AI Overviews began rolling out to all users in the US. In Germany, the feature launched on March 26, 2025, in German and English; at launch, it was available to signed-in users aged 18 and over. The German interface calls it “Übersicht mit KI.”
According to Google, AI Overviews are generated by a Gemini model customized for Google Search. Even so, they are not the same as the Gemini app: Gemini is a separate AI assistant with its own rules. A close relative is AI Mode, Google’s conversational AI feature for more complex questions. Since January 2026, people have been able to ask a follow-up question directly from an AI Overview on mobile devices, and since May 2026 on desktop worldwide as well; the conversation then continues in AI Mode.
How AI Overviews come together
According to Google, the model works together with Google Search’s existing systems: Google’s web index, systems designed to identify reliable and relevant content, and the Knowledge Graph, Google’s knowledge base. Like AI Mode, AI Overviews can issue several related queries on subtopics of a question to build an answer; Google calls this query fan-out. Google says this lets a wider and more diverse set of pages appear as links.
Each of these links is an AI citation; when an AI Overview names a business only in the text, without linking to one of its pages, that is a mention. Google says it designed AI Overviews to show only information supported by high-quality content from the web, so they generally don’t hallucinate the way other applications built on language models can. For topics where information quality is especially important, which Google calls “Your Money or Your Life” topics, Google says it sets an even higher bar for reliable sources. At the same time, Google’s help pages state that AI Overviews can and will make mistakes.
When a page can be linked
According to Google, a page is eligible to appear as a link in AI Overviews if it is included in Google’s web index and eligible to be shown with a text excerpt, known as a snippet. For that, Google’s crawler Googlebot must be able to fetch the page, which means the page must be crawlable for it: the site’s robots.txt file must not block Googlebot, and neither may its hosting or a content delivery network (CDN). Google says there are no additional technical requirements.
Google also states that AI Overviews and AI Mode require no new machine-readable files, AI text files, or additional markup in the code, and no special schema.org structured data. This is a statement about Google’s own AI features. Other AI systems read websites in their own ways, as do AI agents that carry out tasks on the web on their own; structured data and an llms.txt file are meant to make content easier for them to process, and Google explicitly calls it fine to maintain an llms.txt file for such services.
Controls and measurement
Website owners decide for themselves whether their content may appear in AI Overviews. For individual pages, according to Google, the usual Google Search directives apply, which sit in a page’s HTML (the robots meta tag) or in the server’s response (the X-Robots-Tag): noindex removes a page from Google’s web index, and nosnippet prevents its content from being used as direct input for AI Overviews and AI Mode.
Since August 31, 2026, all websites worldwide have also had a setting in Google Search Console, Google’s tool for website owners. It applies to a whole site or part of it, depending on how the site is set up in Search Console. Under “Settings” and then “Search generative AI,” site owners can choose whether the site’s links and content appear in Google Search’s generative AI features. These are AI Overviews, AI Mode, and the generative AI features in Google Discover, the part of Google Search that suggests content based on people’s interests. Inclusion is the default, and according to Google, the setting does not affect other parts of Google Search.
These controls are meant for content that should deliberately stay out, that is, for a deliberate AI answer opt-out. An unintended noindex or nosnippet on important pages, or a Search Console setting switched to exclude by mistake, can keep a website out of AI Overviews without anyone noticing. That makes these settings worth checking regularly.
Since August 31, 2026, Search Console’s generative AI performance report has shown, for all websites worldwide, how often links to a site appeared in AI Overviews and AI Mode.