AI Overviews
The AI-written summary above the blue links, stitched from several pages with small citation links attached.
See it
What it is
AI Overviews is Google's generated answer block above the blue links: a few synthesized paragraphs with small citation links off to the side. It grew out of the 2023 Search Generative Experience and went wide in 2024. Under the hood it runs query fan-out: your one question is split into several background searches, and the model stitches an answer from whatever pages best resolve each piece.
That changes what you optimize for. Getting cited is not the same as ranking first. Citations tend to go to pages that answer one narrow sub-question cleanly, in self-contained passages, with concrete specifics (numbers, dates, named steps) that a model can lift without guessing. Clear headings, direct first sentences, and stated facts beat atmospheric intros.
Gotcha: this is a traffic story, not just a ranking story. Informational queries increasingly end inside the box, so a page that used to earn clicks for 'what is X' may keep its position and lose its visitors. There is no separate opt-out either. The nosnippet and max-snippet controls that keep you out of AI Overviews also strip your ordinary result text and featured snippets. And overviews still misattribute and mangle claims, so watch what gets quoted about you.
Ask AI for it
Rewrite this page so an AI search system can quote it accurately. For each section: lead with a direct, self-contained answer sentence, then support it with specifics (numbers, dates, versions, named steps, sources). Turn vague claims into checkable facts, and cut intros that restate the heading. Make every H2 a real question someone would ask, add a short definition paragraph near the top for the core term, and keep each passage understandable if it is lifted out on its own with no surrounding context. Do not pad, do not repeat the keyword, and keep my voice.