AI Overviews

AI Overviews are AI-written answer blocks that appear at the top of Google Search results, summarizing information from several web pages and linking to those pages. (In the Vietnamese interface, Google calls the feature “Thông tin tổng quan do AI tạo”.) Searchers get the gist on Google itself before they decide whether to click through to any site.

What are AI Overviews?

AI Overviews are the production version of the AI experiment Google ran in Search Labs. On May 14, 2024, Google announced it was rolling the feature out to all users in the US, running on a custom Gemini model built for Search (Google Blog, May 2024). In October 2024 it expanded to more than 100 countries and passed 1 billion monthly users (Google Blog, October 2024). By May 20, 2025, AI Overviews were available in more than 200 countries and territories and more than 40 languages (Google Blog, May 2025). Google Search Help lists Vietnam and the Vietnamese language among the supported markets (Google Search Help, accessed October 2026).

How do AI Overviews work?

Google’s documentation for site owners (Google Search Central, December 2025) says:

• An AI Overview only shows when the system judges it adds value over regular results, so many queries don’t get one.
• Google may use a “query fan-out” technique, running several related searches across subtopics on its own to find more supporting pages for the answer.
• To be a supporting link, a page has to be indexed and eligible to show a snippet. There are no other technical requirements.
• Site owners can limit what is shown with nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet or noindex.

Users can’t turn AI Overviews off. The only option is the “Web” filter, which shows links alone. Google also states plainly that AI Overviews can be wrong and recommends checking important information against several sources.

How do AI Overviews affect traffic?

Pew Research Center tracked the browsing histories of 900 US adults during March 2025. About 18% of Google searches produced an AI summary, 88% of those summaries cited three or more sources, and the median summary was 67 words long. Users ended their browsing session on 26% of pages with an AI summary, compared with 16% of pages showing only traditional results (Pew Research Center, July 2025).

Google reads it differently. Its site-owner documentation describes clicks from pages with AI Overviews as “higher quality” clicks, with users spending more time on the site. The May 2025 blog post says that in the US and India, usage of Google grew by more than 10% for the types of queries that show AI Overviews. Whichever reading you accept, your presence in AI Overviews now deserves the same tracking as your rankings, especially with zero-click search still on the rise.

Measuring AI Overviews in Search Console

Impressions and clicks from AI Overviews are counted together with everything else in the Performance report, under the “Web” search type. In June 2026 Google added a separate generative AI performance report showing which URLs appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode, broken down by country, device and time. The report opened to all websites on August 31, 2026 (Google Search Central Blog, June 2026).

AI Overviews vs AI Mode

Frequently asked questions

Does a website need to do anything special to appear in AI Overviews?

According to Google, there are no extra requirements and no special schema. The page needs to be indexed, allowed to show a snippet and genuinely useful. For deeper optimization, see the glossary entry on GEO.

Are AI Overviews accurate?

Not always. Google’s own help page says AI Overviews can and will make mistakes. Brands should search the questions people ask about them on a regular schedule to see how the AI is describing them.

If you want to know how your website shows up in AI Overviews and need an SEO plan to match, Adtek’s SEO team can talk it through with you on our contact page.