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AI search terminology

AI Overviews

What is AI Overviews?

AI Overviews is Google's feature that places an AI-generated summary with linked sources above the conventional search results.

Who uses the term AI Overviews?

AI Overviews is Google's own product name and is used precisely for that reason. Practitioners use it when they mean Google specifically rather than AI search in general.

The feature launched broadly in 2024 and replaced the earlier Search Generative Experience label.

How does AI Overviews differ from related terms?

AI Overviews is a single product. AI search is the category containing it alongside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and others.

Appearing in AI Overviews is a measurable event tied to one platform, which makes it easier to report on than AI visibility as a whole.

What does AEO GEO LLM Seeding AI SEO - Or Whatever The F$ck You Want to Call It say about AI Overviews?

Google AI Overviews appears in the book as one of the surfaces the work is judged on, not as a discipline of its own. It is named in the book’s statement of stakes, that the discipline decides whether ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews mention your clients or your competitors’ clients, and again in its measurement chapter, which tells practitioners to run a fixed prompt set monthly across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok and Google AI Overviews.

Read about the book's argument.

Related terms

  • AI search

    AI search is the category of search experiences in which an AI system interprets the query and composes a response, rather than returning a list of links alone.

  • AI visibility

    AI visibility is the extent to which a brand or entity is named, cited and recommended by AI systems in response to relevant questions.

  • Citation frequency

    Citation frequency is a measure of how often an AI system names or links a given source across a set of relevant prompts.

  • AEO

    AEO is the abbreviation of Answer Engine Optimisation, the practice of making a source likely to be used in the direct answer a search or AI system returns.

All 12 terms AEO GEO LLM Seeding AI SEO - Or Whatever The F$ck You Want to Call It