What are Google AI Overviews?
Published . Updated .
AI Overviews: Generated summaries that Google Search shows above some results, answering the query in a few lines with links to the pages it drew on.
Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode may use query fan-out, so the pages linked in an overview can come from searches the user never typed. To be a supporting link, a page has to be crawlable by Googlebot, indexed and eligible for a snippet; Google lists no extra technical requirement and no guarantee of being shown.
Being linked in an AI Overview is a citation in the same sense as a link in a ChatGPT answer. Our guide to AI citations covers how the assistants choose them.
Read next
- How do AI citations work in ChatGPT, Claude and Grok?
- What is Google AI Mode?
- Does ranking on Google get you cited by AI?
Sources
See the fan-out for your own prompts
Only Fan Out is a free Chrome side panel that lists the queries, fetched pages and cited pages behind each ChatGPT, Claude or Grok answer. Nothing leaves your browser.
Add to Chrome, it's free