What are Google AI Overviews?
AI Overviews are topic summaries that provide quick answers, in response to users’ search queries. These summaries are designed to help users understand a topic without having to visit multiple websites. Google’s AI Overviews often appear before organic listings and sometimes even above ads.
Users can expand the AI Overviews to see the sources of Google’s information and click through to those website sources. Plus, at the bottom of AI Overviews, users can ask follow-up questions where they can naturally interact with Google in a manner similar to chatbots like Open.AI’s ChatGPT.
How are Google AI Overviews Formed?
To form the AI Overviews, Google pulls information from different websites and Google’s Gemini language model combines the information into clear, cohesive and organized summaries.
The sources (website content) that Google utilizes to form its AI Overviews are selected in a similar way that Google ranks webpages in its regular organic search results. Website authority, content relevance, and user experience are key, but in the context of the questions users are asking Google.
Authority refers to the importance or weight given to a page relative to other pages that are potential sources for a given topic. For most topics, there are thousands or even millions of pages available that could be utilized. Google uses the pages that are most likely to provide accurate, reliable information.
Of course, the most important indicator of the relevance of a page is the content on that page. However, as well as containing relevant content to users’ queries, Google also assesses the depth of that content within a website, and the structural formatting given to that content.
Finally, Google prioritizes and rewards websites that deliver a strong user experience.
How Should Brands Respond to Google AI Overviews?
Given the prominence of AI Overviews, brands should strategize to be included as sources for relevant topics. By being part of AI Overviews, brands can benefit from increased website traffic, owning the narrative on topics, and being highlighted as authoritative by Google.
Continuing to optimize for the SEO pillars mentioned above, brands can position themselves to be included in Google’s AI Overviews.
- How do brands gain Google authority?
The biggest indicator of website authority, for Google, is inbound links, and the quality of those inbound links. These are best practice tactics for brands to gain Google authority:
- Create high quality, compelling, and unique content that other website authors will want to reference (link to)
- Earn and attract links on merit (it is vital to avoid gaining links artificially)
- Earn links from other authoritative websites such as scientific, academic and government
- How can brands create relevant content?
As well as relevant search term content, brands should optimize website depth and the structural formatting of the content:
- Brands should add questions to keyword research. Think about the questions that users ask Google that a brand would want to appear for. Publish webpages, blog articles and FAQs containing those questions, and the answers
- Format each question as an H2 or H3 tag. This highlights, to Google, that a brand has prioritized the question and answered the question
- Ensure that content is never more than two clicks deep from the website homepage
- How do brands deliver a strong user experience for SEO?
These are the same technical website health best practices that should already be employed for regular SEO such as site speed, no broken links, relevant metadata to page content, and more:
- Brands should continue to conduct regular technical audits and correct any challenges
Are Ads Included in Google AI Overviews?
Google started including Search Ads and Shopping Ads within AI Overviews, last year. However, ads are not always included in AI Overviews, and are only triggered when:
- The user’s question has a commercial angle – where a product or service could be a relevant answer
- An ad is relevant to both the query and the information provided
No additional setup is required from advertisers – existing Search Ads, Shopping Ads and Performance Max ads can appear as an AI Overview ad. However, currently, there is no additional reporting or segmentation to break out the performance of ads that appeared in the AI Overviews, and advertisers cannot opt out of having their ads showing within AI Overviews.
How Can Brands Ensure their Ads are Shown in AI Overviews?
Google does not typically allow long tail search terms in Google Ads accounts, citing “Not eligible – Low search volume”. Therefore, performing keyword research on possible questions will likely be fruitless. The tactics brands should use to have their ads included in AI Overviews are as follows:
- Ensure coverage on category keywords that can form answers to user questions. For example, a user might ask Google “how to reduce the appearance of fine lines and pores?” Amongst Google’s AI Overview, an advertiser bidding on “reduce fine lines” could have its ad served
- Utilize broader match types to give the brand a greater chance of matching to user queries and being served in AI Overviews
- Utilize Performance Max. Like the above, Performance Max will allow Google greater flexibility to serve ads based on the relevancy of the user question
Although advertisers often avoid broad match and Performance Max, their own AI functionality to serve ads to the right people makes them ideal tools for AI Overviews. Given AI is Google’s main priority for 2025, features and ad types such as broad match and Performance Max will become much more powerful, in the medium term, so testing and mastering them early will give brands a competitive advantage.
More information:
https://blog.google/products/search/generative-ai-google-search-may-2024/
https://searchengineland.com/google-ai-overviews-ads-mobile-us-launch-447247
https://www.precisiondigital.com/post/google-unveils-ai-powered-search-generative-experience
