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.
b/cited does not track AI Overviews. The tracked prompt panel runs ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity; there is no Google-AIO provider, and Google offers no API that would give one.
Treat Perplexity as a proxy only with care. It is not one in any mechanical sense — Perplexity runs its own crawler and index, supplemented by Bing, not Google, so the two systems are selecting from different candidate sets. What they share is a general preference for structured, current, directly-answering pages, which is why work that earns Perplexity citations tends to help in AI Overviews too. That is a claim about good content, not about a shared 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.