AI Overview is the AI-synthesized answer Google places above the ten blue links for ~25-50% of US English queries (steadily expanding). It compresses several sources into one direct answer to the user's question.
If your site isn't one of the sources Google reaches for, you're invisible to that user — they may never scroll past the overview to see the organic results.
Where it shows up
Most consistently on:
- Informational queries — "what is X", "how does Y work"
- Comparison queries — "X vs Y", "best X for Y"
- How-to queries — procedural questions
Less consistently on transactional or navigational queries (Google still surfaces the SERP for those because user intent is to click somewhere specific).
How to get cited
Same fundamentals as ranking organically — clean structured data, topical authority, trustworthy citations from established domains. Plus AI-specific signals: FAQPage and HowTo schemas are over-represented in cited sources, and dedicated AI-crawler allow rules in robots.txt + Google-Extended User-Agent unblocked.
BCited measures AI Overview citation indirectly today (the tracked prompt panel doesn't have a direct Google-AIO provider yet — it's on the roadmap). For now, Perplexity's citation behavior is a reasonable proxy since they use Google as the underlying search index.
The previous name
Google launched the feature as "Search Generative Experience" (SGE) in 2023, then renamed and graduated it to AI Overview in 2024. Same product, different label.