Glossary
AI Overviews
In short: AI Overviews are the AI-generated summaries Google shows above organic results for some queries, built from pages in its index and linked as sources.
AI Overviews are Google's generative summaries that appear at the top of the results page for queries where Google judges a synthesised answer helpful. They are produced by a Gemini model working from pages in the regular Google index, and they show a small set of linked sources alongside the text.
For UK businesses three points matter. First, there is no separate crawler: Googlebot feeds both Search and AI Overviews, so you cannot opt out of the latter without leaving the former. Disallowing Google-Extended only affects training, not Overviews. Second, the sources Google cites are usually pages that already rank well and answer the question directly, so conventional SEO and clear, question-shaped content both help. Third, Overviews are location-sensitive, so a query from Manchester may produce a different summary and different sources than the same query from Bristol.
Seoptist tracks Google AI Overviews on the Growth plan and above through a licensed SERP data provider, with a location set per brand. Each prompt is sampled three times a week; the audit also checks whether your pages carry the structured data and answer-first paragraphs that make them easy to summarise.