Google AI Overviews: The Latest Insights You Need To Know

As Google’s AI Overviews are used in the American results, some funny results emerge, and the impact of this new feature on search results becomes clear.

This week, I continued reviewing Google’s AI Overviews feature. I attended two webinars and saw dozens of funny and dramatic AI Overview posts on social media. I wanted to share with you the most important notes I took.

Mastering Google’s New AI Overviews Feature

In this webinar, Tomek Rudzki and Bart Goralewicz shared their views on how Google’s AI Briefs impact user experience and offered advice to site owners.

In the 25 thousand e-commerce queries analyzed by Bart Goralewicz, 80% of the resources appearing in AI Overviews were not included in the organic results. The AI ​​Overviews experience is an “accelerator” for product-related queries.

Instead of presenting summaries of organic results, Google shows users directly clickable products and what they will get next. This approach includes direct links to product detail pages from various online stores. It seems like it’s time for online stores to optimize their product detail pages (PDP).

Basic Information and Changes

• AI Overviews and Old SGE: Google has renamed AI Overviews, previously known as SGE, to be more understandable.
• Automatic and Mandatory Results: By reducing automatically generated artificial intelligence results, Google has eliminated forced user interaction. This was especially evident with high PPC queries.
• Data Coverage and Coverage Rates: In analyses conducted in various verticals, such as finance, e-commerce, and publishing, Google AI Overviews coverage rates have decreased significantly. For e-commerce queries, AI Overviews can organically present information from sources that do not appear in the top 60 results.

Scope and Optimization of AI Overviews

• Rich Snippets and Content: Unlike rich snippets, Google AI Overviews rewrites pieces of content and presents them to the user. This is especially important for user queries that require short and precise answers.
• E-commerce and Publishing: In the e-commerce vertical, content pieces that provide information about products rank at the top, while in publishing, content structured by user intent is more effective.

Technological and Structural Factors

• Use of Technology: Websites’ technological structure, especially the use of JavaScript, plays an important role in their inclusion in AI Overviews. Websites that use heavy technologies reduce their chances of being included in AI Overviews.
• User Experience and Content Structure: Content that prioritizes user experience and complements the user journey has a higher success rate in AI Overviews. Content that answers users’ questions with clear and short answers stands out.

Practical Suggestions

Websites must structure their content according to user queries to be included in AI Overviews. Adopt comprehensive and user-focused content strategies.

Google is expected to increase the scope of AI Overviews. Websites should understand the AI ​​Overviews algorithm and optimize their content accordingly. According to Rudzki and Goralewicz, this does not seem so difficult.

Funny Results from AI Overviews

One wonders: Are we throwing away the work we have done so far? “Where is my EEAT?” I feel like asking, and when I see this result, I laugh and watch this funny situation that Google is in. AI Overviews’ answer to the query “Smoking while pregnant” is “Doctors recommend 2–3 cigarettes a day”:

Misunderstanding user intent this much may have been a mistake made during the training phase of AI Overviews. For example, a search for “smoking during pregnancy” might tend to yield a positive response. This is a trial-and-error process, and it looks like Google will fix such errors as they are noticed.

This technology also appears to be pro-verification; The user tries to satisfy his desire and follow the flow of thought. In short, reading the user’s intention is more of a priority for him than the accuracy of the answer. To the extent that he does this, he can sell you something. This is why such funny results emerge. Google, at the risk of sounding ridiculous at first, stands behind this technology and says “the caravan will move on the road”.

I started the online course this week to better understand AI Overviews and LLMs in general.

I will continue to share my views on AI overviews in the coming weeks, and instead of crying and whining, it would be better for us to try to understand how it works.