Google curtails appearance of AI Overviews in searches: Know what happened

Data shows that the AI Overviews in Google Search appears for only 15 per cent of search queries. The reduced visibility, however, is not the result of recent criticism over misleading overviews

Google announced “AI Overviews” at its annual I/O event and the feature was released to US users on May 14. The rolling out of the feature was followed by people sharing screenshots of misleading answers generated by AI Overviews. Google had offered an explanation stating that some of the screenshots were faked, and ensured that the AI Overview will be improving after learning from the feedback. It seems that the technology giant has now reduced visibility of AI Overview in Google Search, especially when compared to the Search Generative Experience (SGE) experiment which was launched in 2023.

According to data shared by Bright Edge, an enterprise SEO platform with Search Engine Land, Google is showing AI Overviews for only 15 per cent of searches, that too in collapsed or opt-in state. AI Overviews appeared 40-50 per cent when the feature was launched and 84 per cent since February 2024 when considering collapsed or manually activated Overviews. BrightEdge also reported that only 27 per cent of AI generated answers to questions on the day the feature was widely launched. This shows that Google had dialled down how often AI Overview will appear even before the debacle, and the appearance has continued to decrease after that.

The data is based on when SGE was still an opt-in test. The data also shows that it is on asking a question in Search or on appearance of Feature Snippet, that AI Overviews shows up. That means that local searches are not triggering AI.

This change points to Google’s careful approach resulting in scaling back on AI overviews while continuing to improve the feature.