Google Search to expand AI Overviews to six new countries including India

The feature will soon be available in Google Search in the United Kingdom, India, Japan, Indonesia, Mexico, and Brazil

Google Search on Thursday said that its AI Overviews will be coming to six more countries, including India, over two months after the feature was launched in the US.

The feature introduced in the US in May this year offers users a preview of a topic or query based on a variety of sources, including web sources, in the search bar.

The feature will be added to Google Search in the UK, India, Japan, Indonesia, Mexico, and Brazil.

Further, the experience in each country will have local language support, said Google.

“In India, we’re rolling out AI Overviews in English and Hindi and also introducing popular India-first features that were well-received during our Search Labs experiment, helping you easily switch between English and Hindi results with the language toggle button, and listen to responses with text-to-speech by tapping the 'Listen' button,” said the company in a blogpost.

Google also introduced a new right-hand link display for AI Overviews on desktop – also accessible on mobile by tapping the site icons on the upper right side of the screen.

“These updates are starting to roll out globally today for AI Overviews in all launched countries, as well as for Search Labs users in more than 120 countries and territories,” said the company.

For the AI Overviews feature, Google will be rolling this expansion out gradually over the course of several weeks.

During the testing, Google said that it found Indian users were listening to AI Overviews responses more often than other countries.

“With AI Overviews, we’re seeing that people have been visiting a greater diversity of websites for help with more complex questions. And when people click from search result pages with AI Overviews, these clicks are higher quality for websites — meaning users are more likely to spend more time on the sites they visit,” said the company.

Google further said that it was currently testing the addition of links to relevant web pages directly within the text of AI Overviews, for ease of access.

“This experiment has shown early, positive results: Showing links to supporting web pages directly within AI Overviews is driving higher traffic to publisher sites. We’ll continue testing different ways of presenting information that’s most helpful for people, while prioritising approaches that drive traffic to relevant websites,” read a blog from Google.