AI Overviews
SEO and AI visibility
SEO and AI visibility
AI Overviews are Google's generated summaries at the top of the results page, with links to the sources used.
For part of all queries Google shows a summarised answer above the blue links. Users often read that answer without clicking through, which shows up as stable positions with falling clicks.
You can't steer it directly: there is no setting and no ad slot. What you can do is give a short, self-contained answer per section, state facts explicitly, and make sure your page ranks in the top results for that question at all — that's typically where sources are drawn from.
In practice
Don't watch positions alone in Search Console: a falling CTR at the same position is usually the effect of these answer blocks.
Related terms
- GEOGEO stands for generative engine optimization: working on the chance that AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity name your company on their own in an answer.
- SERPThe SERP is a search engine's results page: alongside blue links it holds ads, maps, videos, question boxes and AI answers.
- LLMAn LLM is a large language model trained to predict the next word, which lets it understand and generate text. ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini run on them.