For many years now, Google has had the same simple construct. Users ask a question or enter a series of keywords or phrases, and then Google provides endless pages of relevant links (websites) you can explore to find the information they need.
Although this format is still in place, Google has introduced a significant number of new features to the search experience over the years. One of its latest inclusions is AI Overviews (AIO).
Now, instead of just getting a list of pages to go through after entering a search query, Google will provide direct answers or the required information directly above the fold using an AI-generated summary tool. This means that in many cases, individuals don’t even need to click through links to get the information they need.
While this is great news for search engine users, the same might not be said for all businesses. AIO is becoming a significant contributor to “zero-click searches.” With users not necessarily needing to click through search engine links, some sites can see severe blows to their organic click-through rates.
So, what does this mean for traditional SEO? Well, while the long-term impact of AIO on conventional search engine marketing is still up for debate, it’s clear that businesses need to start adapting their focus from trying to rank exclusively on search engine results pages (SERPs) to gaining more direct mentions and source link redirects on AI-enabled answer engines.
How AIO Works Behind the Scenes
While it may seem like a simple summary tool, AIO actually has a variety of supporting technologies working behind the scenes to deliver highly accurate results to users:
Use of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Real-Time Synthesis
The main engines used to drive AIO are Large Language Models (LLMs). LLMs are designed to mimic how human brains work, leveraging a neural network (“transformer”) that analyzes large amounts of text while learning from different patterns contained in it.
Once a query is entered into Google, the LLM quickly scans these large datasets for relevant information and synthesizes it in real time, allowing the tools to provide relevant and coherent responses to users.
Personalization Based on Search History and Location
Unlike keyword and phrase matching, which typically shows SERP results in the same way from one browser to the next, AI Overviews are more personalized. Google’s AIO tries to provide highly relevant results based on the user by leveraging their past search history and even geolocation. This means the summaries presented won’t always be the same from one user to the next.
This creates another layer of complexity when trying to analyze when and why brand mentions make it into AIO for some users and not others.
Client-Side Rendering and Its SEO Implications
Client-side rendering may also contribute to how AIO results are presented. For example, if a business site relies heavily on JavaScript or other loading elements, it can be more difficult for AI algorithms to crawl and index content for use in generated results.
Much like search engine crawlers, AI platforms and answer engines also prefer indexing information from easily scannable sites with clear hierarchical structures. Too many web elements can interfere with this capability and make it less likely that certain content is used for AIO.
Google's Patent Insights and How Pages Are Chosen
Google has always had a well-kept secret of how its algorithms operate, and this extends to how its AIO functions. However, by looking at Google’s various patents and their knowledge graphs, you can start to pick apart how they prefer to see information grouped.
Over the years, these patents have shown a strong emphasis on the quality and authoritativeness of content. Google has also introduced specific guidelines for website owners known as E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness). Much like with traditional SEO efforts, there is strong evidence that these guidelines play a significant role in deciding which sites get referenced in AIO.
Identifying AIO-Prone Search Queries
It’s important for businesses to look for ways to better understand how their target audience searches for information and when and why these queries trigger an AIO response.
Types of Queries That Commonly Trigger AIO
Informational Queries
Informational queries are the ones individuals make when they’re looking for something specific. These are typically quite broad and can cover anything from looking for a definition to a word, breaking down a complex topic into an easy-to-understand summary, or getting step-by-step instructions on something.
An example of an information search query would be “what are the symptoms of a cold?” or “how do I replace my flooring? AIO will then source relevant answers for the queries across a wide range of sites and synthesize the most commonly found responses.
Comparative or Evaluative Searches
Comparative searches, also known as “evaluative” searches, are made when something is trying to compare features or benefits between multiple products, services, or concepts. In most cases, these types of searches happen if someone is trying to choose which option is best from them to use and can be a prelude to transactional queries.
An example of a comparative search would be “best TVs under $1000” or “hybrid vehicles vs. gas-powered vehicles.” AIO will often provide users with comparison tables or a side-by-side comparison of each option.
Decision-Making and Transactional Queries
Transactional search queries express intent by a user to potentially purchase a product or service. These terms can resemble comparative searches, but make incorporate keywords like “best” or “buy” in their phrasing.
Some common examples of transactional queries are “where to buy groceries near me,” “best power tools under $100,” and “quotes for hotels in Florida.” While each of these terms varies in its structure, they each insinuate that a potential purchase will be made. In response, AIO will try to include all the relevant details to help complete that purchase, including listing key benefits, pricing, or availability.
Using Regex to Surface Likely AIO Queries in GSC
Regex for Question/Intent Detection
Using Regular Expressions (Regex) can be a helpful way to trigger AIO. Google Search Console (GSC) has a feature that allows you to create regex filters to help isolate search terms that use common expressions that are likely to create new AI-generated results.
For example, looking for expressions that start with “what,” “how,” or “why” typically contains statements that end with a question mark and are usually perfect candidates for AIO. You can then filter down to these terms and see where and how users interact with those content pages.
Regex example: ^(what|how|why|where|when|who)\s+.*?\?$
Regex for Commercial and How-To Queries
Regex formatting can also be used to break down searches that are closely associated with commercial or transactional queries. Common commercial queries can be filtered out by using terms like “best,” “top,” “buy,” “price,” or even words like “cheap.”
Regex example: (best|top|buy|price|cheap)\s+.*
Cleanup Regex to Remove Irrelevant Terms
Regex can also be used to help clean up data so that it limits queries from containing certain key terms. For example, if you want to focus on using non-branded searches, you can remove your brand name or others to help narrow down your focus.
The benefits of this approach are that it allows you to create a more precise set of queries that show how AIO responds to more generics user questions.
Regex example: ^(?!.*yourbrand).*?(what|how)\s+.*
Validating and Tracking AIO Presence
Manual SERP Checks and Incognito Searches
Doing manual SERP checks is one of the most straightforward ways to look for branded AIO references. You can use a number of variable searches and take note of where and when your content is referenced and which pages tend to have the best results.
However, to make sure you get accurate results that don’t reference your own search history, you’ll want to make sure your public IP address is masked. To do this, you could use incognito mode in your browser or make use of a VPN services when testing out new search queries.
Using Tools Like SEMRush and Ahrefs
Another option for tracking AIO results is by investing in a traditional SEO tools. Platforms like SEMRush and Ahref both have new features specifically designed for monitoring and tracking content page references and backlinks to websites.
When using these platforms, you can track any keywords or phrases your currently rank for on SERPs or add in new keywords into your own customer keyword list. This is a great way to track both organic search rankings and AIO results on in one place.
Metrics to Track
As you start monitoring your AIO performance over time, there are some important metrics to focus on, especially as you start making specific site optimization efforts designed to increase the amount of times your brand is mentioned on AI Overviews
- Is an AIO shown? - The most important metric to check is whether or not your content shows up accurately on AI Overviews when a relevant search queries is used. This is typically tracked as an AIO presence rate, which is represented as a percentage of how often content shows up on AIO when using the same phrase types. An AIO presence rate will be fairly dynamic over time, similar to SERP rankings, but can be a helpful metric that gives you a general overview of how well your content is optimized.
- Is your site cited? - Outside of measuring your AI presence rate, you can also check to see how you often your website gets sited in AI Overviews. Not all results may provide direct site references if there is a lot of similar content available online. Having more unique and highly authoritative content can increase the frequency that your site is cited directly and can help to increase your organic click-through rates.
- Changes in CTR, Impressions, or Position? - It's important to try to see if there are certain correlations between how often your webcontent is referenced in AIO, how many impressions or click-through rates your website analytics are showing and your general SERP positioning. To do this, keep a close eye on your Google Search Console and Analytics metrics and monitor these figures over time.
Optimizing Content for AIO Inclusion
Although tracking AIO metrics is important, without certain optimization efforts, you may find it difficult to get your content listed across differen AI answer engines. Below are some common strategies you can follow to improve your chances for AIO inclusion:
On-Page Optimization Tactics
- Provide Direct Answers and Summaries - AI Overviews were introduced by Google to help reduce the amount of follow up research users needed to complete after entering new queries. To achieve this, AI algorithms typically look for easy-to-understand, definitive answers to questions or step-by-step instructions. By ensuring your web content fits this format, it’s much more likely you content will be listed in AIO.
- Use Lists, Tables, and Clear Formatting - Another way to add some more simplicity to your content is by creating a clear structure. Instead of using long paragraphs of content, think of how you can break up the text so it’s more readable by users and search engine crawlers. This can be done by incorporating bulleted or numbered lists, tables, and using a hierarchical structure for titles and subheadings.
- Add Structured Data and Schema Markup - Using structured data, “schema makeup,” on your site is another strategy commonly used in traditional SEO, but can also be beneficial when optimizing your content for AIO. This helps to better categorize your content so it’s easier to reference when generating AI responses that feature lists, tables, or comparison tools.
Strategic Content Approaches
- Publish Unique Data and Research - One of the best ways to help your content stand out from others is to build up your site authority. AI search tools want to make sure the information they’re referencing provides real value to readers, and building up your site’s authority is a great way to get included in these results.
- Include Follow-Up Questions - Instead of just limiting your content to address a singular topic, it’s important to try to incorporate semantic information that essentially creates follow up information proactively for readers. When AI tools stumble across your information, they’ll see that you have much broader coverage of a topic that can be used to help support continuous dialogues with users as needed.
- Prioritize HTML-Visible Content - While the forward facing format of your content is important, it’s also critical to make sure that your site’s HTML source code is easily accessible to by AI crawlers. Try to minimize heavy rendering elements like JavaScript and keep your site’s coding as streamlined as possible.
- Use Multiple Content Types (Images, Videos, Charts) - As AI tools continue to advance, more and more of them are leveraging multiple multimedia formats when accepting new queries from users and when generating their results. This means it’s a good idea to start diversifying your content to give AI crawlers more options to choose from when sourcing users’ needs. This means leverage more imagery on your site, using explaining videos, and incorporating data charts and infographics.
Focus on E-E-A-T Principles
Google’s guiding E-E-A-T principles are an important element for business to understand and follow. These not only help to add more credibility to the content created, but also help businesses maintain important best practices that have a bearing on whether or not AI Overviews list their site content.
Some of the most important principles of E-E-A-T to implement include:
- Demonstrate Experience and Trustworthiness - Experience and credibility is critical for helping users feel more confident in the information they’re reading. This helps to keep their attention longer and more likely to want share that content with others. Making sure you’re sticking to writing topics that you’re highly knowledgeable about and listing specific author bios with highlighted credentials in all of your blog and articles is a good way to help demonstrate this industry experience.
- Offer Insightful, Brand-Relevant Perspectives - Trying to differentiating your content from all the other information online is also a critical element for following E-E-A-T principles. Offering up your own unique perspectives and back those thoughts up with solid evidence helps to showcase your expertise and presents more opportunities to have your content referenced by AI answer engines.
Common Challenges and Pitfalls
When make optimizations for AIO, it possible that you may running into certain obstacles that you’ll need to navigate around to be successful. Some of these include:
Reduced Organic Traffic and CTR Drops
A large concern for businesses as AIO becomes more commonly used is that is often leads go zero-click search. Because search engine users are able to get the information they need upfront, they don’t always have a need to navigate directly to a website to get more details.
Because of this, businesses can start to see significant declines in their organic click-through rates. This can mean needing to make major modifications to current SEO strategies to make up for this difference in web traffic.
Difficulty in Measuring Rankings
One are that’s becoming more nuanced as AIO and other AI-enabled search features grow in popularity is how keywork rankings are measured. Because AI Overviews exist abovet he fold, taking up important real estate on SERPs, how and where your content ranks isn’t as straightforward anymore.
This means businesses need to be more adaptable when creating their SEO campaigns, and ensure they have multiple methods to track and measure their ranking performance. This includes paying more attention to more subtle signals like engagement rates, and referral traffic sources.
Accuracy and Quality Control of AIO Responses
As will all AI-enabled tools and services, because AI algorithms pull information from multiple sources, there is always the potential that the responses generated for users contain certain inaccuracies. As a business owner, it’s important to understand if and how these inaccuracies show up, especially when they reference branded products or services.
Looking Ahead – The Future of AIO
Long-Term Role of AIO in Search
As AI adoption continues to increase each year, it’s becoming clear that AIO will soon be a core feature used to source helping information online.
It’s also safe to say that as the sophistication of AI-enabled answer engines increases, they’ll be able to accurately respond to much more complex queries, with many people making these summaries their first choice when starting in-depth research on topics.
Potential Changes in Coverage and Query Sensitivity
While AI Overviews are still a relatively new addition from Google, the various query formats that trigger them are continuing to expand. It’s likely to that as AI continue to mature and algorithms improve, they’ll be able to offer even more flexibility to add more value to users with more unique search needs.
Monetization and Ad Integrations
Becasue of AI Overviews prominent placement on SERPs, it’s likely that we’ll also begin to see certain types of monetization associated with them. This may include seamless integrations with Google Adwords or even an entirely new advertising format designed specifically with AI-enabled keyword optimization in mind.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should I Opt Out of AIO?
This really depends on your reasons for wanting to not be listed in AIO. Google has made it possible to opt out of AIO by using a robots.txt directive (google-extended: none). However, this means missing potential AIO visibility and traffic. Carefully consider if this trade-off aligns with your site's goals before deciding
Will Featured Snippets Be Replaced by AIO?
It's uncertain if AIO will fully replace featured snippets. As of now, both might coexist, serving different needs, or snippets may eventually evolve into AIOs directly.
Why Do AIO Results Vary Between Users?
AI Overviews vary individually due to various factors. Google customized AIO by referencing a user’s search history, location, and other contextual signals to provide the most relevant summary for their specific needs.
What Do Different Result Styles and Colors Mean?
Different AIO styles or colors help you identify information sources or highlight key aspects of the summary.
How Frequently Are AIO Answers Updated?
AI Overviews synthesize web content in near real time. Update frequency depends on the query and how quickly new information appears online. For fast-changing topics, you can expect more frequent updates in AIO to reflect the latest information available.