Google’s AI Overviews: Updates and changes from SGE to 2026

We’ve put together a hub article with everything about AI Overviews including how they work, how they’ve changed over time, and more. We’ll keep it updated with the latest changes, so bookmark it and stay in the loop!

What are AI Overviews?

AI Overviews (AIOs) are AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of Google search results and provide direct answers to user queries. They present key information in a clear summary that may include short explanations, bullet points, and source links. 

The goal of AIOs is to make search faster, easier, and more conversational by combining traditional search results with AI-generated understanding.

They generally appear like this:

On the left, most of the screen is occupied by the answer, displayed on a white or semi-transparent blue background. The response is often presented as formatted text, including paragraphs, bullet points, headings, and more.

Google highlights the key information in blue (as shown in the screenshot above).

To the right of the answer is a list of sources from which the response was generated. Both the answer and sources are often partially hidden to save space in the search results for users who want to explore other results. 

If a user is interested in the AI-generated answer, they can expand it by clicking “Show more.” 

On mobile, tapping this button now opens the AI Mode chat interface, allowing users to continue reading and quickly ask follow-up questions. This change rolled out globally in January 2026.

As of April 2026, Google is testing the same behavior on desktop, where clicking “Show more” transitions the page into an AI Mode-style experience, though this has not yet been officially announced or broadly rolled out.

As of now, on the desktop, you’ll most often see a “Dive deeper in AI Mode” button below the answer. By clicking on it, you can keep the conversation in AI Mode.

Since August 2026, some AI Overviews open at full length by default instead of the shortened version. Google says this happens only for topics where its systems judge the full answer most useful. For those queries, organic results sit even further down the page.

We break down what AI Mode is and how it works in our article.

For YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) queries, disclaimers are included, encouraging users to seek professional advice. For example:

To the right of the disclaimer, users can also rate the generated response.

Locations where you can see AIOs

In late May, at Google I/O 2025, the company announced the expansion of AI Overviews to new countries and languages. With this rollout, AI Overviews are now available in over 200 countries and territories, and in more than 40 languages.

Find the latest list of countries where AI Overviews are available here.

Typical AIOs layouts

There are countless AI Overviews layouts, depending on the query and niche. Here are a few examples:

Structured summary layout (answer cards). The answer can appear as either a concise summary or a more detailed response. It is typically organized into paragraphs, headings, bullets, or sections, includes source links, and may cover multiple related subtopics in one overview.

Step-by-step layout. Designed for “how-to” searches. Information is organized into numbered steps or clear sequential instructions.

Comparison layout. Used when users compare options, products, or ideas. It often shows differences side by side or in grouped sections highlighting pros, cons, and key features.

Local results layout. Combines an AI summary with maps, nearby businesses, ratings, and hours. Usually appears for searches about restaurants, services, or places nearby.

Visual/media layout. Includes images or videos alongside the written summary. Used when visuals help explain the topic, such as travel, recipes, repairs, or design ideas.

Links in AIOs: placement, number, and sources

In addition to the list of sources shown on the right, you can also see small favicons within the response opposite to every bullet. When tapping the icon, users will see links which used to generate that part of the answer.

Here’s how it looks on mobile devices: all links are accessed through site icons. You can tap a group of favicons to see pages where the AI sourced the answer from.

To give users reliable information, Google’s AIOs include blue anchor text hyperlinks to specific pages.

AI-generated snippets also include hyperlinks that guide users to additional Google Search results. Our May 2025 data analysis showed that 43.42% of AI Overview responses contain links to Google organic results.

According to our February 2026 data, an AI Overview cited 15.22 sources on average, and the count peaked at 16.31 in April. Then it dropped sharply: to 7.84 in July and 7.66 in October 2026. That’s about half the spring level, and close to the 6.82 sources we recorded in November 2024.

AIOs shopping results

Another AI Overviews feature with the potential to transform the e-commerce industry is Google Shopping results/products integration into the AI Overviews results for e-commerce queries. It looks like Google is actively building an e-commerce search ecosystem where generated information is combined with products users can buy directly.

For commercial queries, you’ll most often see an AI-generated response that includes product carousels.

The AI Overview generates a browsable list that, when opened, displays clickable product carousels. Every product card includes info about rating, the number of reviews, price and URLs. 

When clicking the product card, you will see a bigger, more detailed one on the right side with the product description, photos, descriptions, reviews, etc. Here, you can choose the website where you want to buy a product. 

Google also provides query suggestions below the carousel. Clicking on them takes you to a new search results page for the selected query.

That’s because this new generative AI shopping experience is built on Google’s Shopping Graph, which has more than 50 billion product listings (2 billion of which are updated every hour).

Additionally, Google Shopping includes an AI Overview feature called Researched with AI. It resembles product selection tips, with sources listed below and on the right side.

By March 2026, AI Overviews appeared on 14% of shopping queries, which is a 5.6x increase from November 2024. Our own data shows a steeper climb: AI Overviews appeared for 2% of E-commerce and Retail queries in May 2025 and 79% in September 2026. The two studies use different query sets, so the figures aren’t directly comparable. Either way, AI is fast becoming a standard part of the online shopping journey.

Ads in AIOs

Before the launch of AI Overviews in May 2024, there were no ads at all. Following the launch, testing began, and reports started emerging that ads would soon appear in AIOs.

• May 2024

In May, the first mention appeared that Google had been testing ads in AI Overviews. It stated that the company is moving forward with a full rollout because it helps people “quickly connect with relevant businesses, products, and services to take the next step at the exact moment they need them.”

• July 2024

Google said it again, that it will soon test ads within its AI Overviews.

• September 2024

The Verge shared news about ads in AI Overviews. The article explained AI-generated responses will include tips and suggest products to help.

• October – November 2024

After several months of testing, Google began rolling out the first ads inside AI Overviews in late 2024. These early placements were initially limited to mobile users in the United States.

The first live examples were widely spotted in November 2024. Ads labeled Sponsored appeared below the AI-generated summary, showing that ads were present but visually separated from the main answer.

• May 2025 

Google expanded ads in AI Overviews to desktop search for U.S. users. This was the first time advertisers could appear directly inside AI-generated results on desktop devices. Google also said expansion to select countries would follow.

• June 2025 

By June 2025, Google officially documented that ads in AI Overviews were available across eligible mobile and desktop experiences. Google explained that ads may appear above or below the AI Overview depending on relevance and auction signals, but not in both places simultaneously.

• Late 2025 

By late 2025, ads in AI Overviews were no longer a small U.S. test. Google stated it had expanded the format to more countries globally, signaling that AI-generated search ads were becoming a standard part of its monetization strategy.

• New updates in 2026

In January 2026, Dan Taylor, Google VP of Global Ads, said AI Overview ads were seeing click and engagement rates about the same as traditional Search ads. In other words, users were already interacting with ads inside AI search experiences in a familiar way.

Another important 2026 update was Google’s redesign of links and sources inside AI results. 

In February 2026, Robby Stein, VP of Google Search, announced more prominent source links and richer source panels in AI Overviews and AI Mode. While not an ad launch directly, it matters because it changes how users choose between sponsored placements, organic sources, and cited websites inside AI results.

How AI Overviews behave in search: data and trends from 2025-2026

We’ve been tracking AI Overviews behavior since 2024, running regular analyses across 100,000 keywords spanning 20 niches. Here’s what the data shows.

Overall AIO presence in search

In May 2025, our research showed AI Overviews appearing for 28.66% of queries. By October 2026, that number reached 83.2%, nearly 3x in 17 months. The share peaked at 84.16% in September 2026.

Most of that growth came in two waves. Presence roughly doubled between May and November 2025. Then, after holding near 60% through the switch to Gemini 3, it climbed again from 69% in June 2026 to 84% in September.

On January 27, 2026, Google announced that Gemini 3 would become the default model powering AI Overviews globally. When we compared AI Overviews before and after the switch, presence barely moved: 61.04% of queries in January 2026 and 59.73% in February.

The numbers looked noticeably different in 2024. As shown in the chart, the share of AI Overviews across the US was around 19% in November 2024. This is nearly the same share as January of that year. In June and July 2024, the share was roughly half of what it was in November. By August 2024, AI Overviews appeared in about 12.5% of desktop searches.

As the data shows, AI Overviews are becoming a regular part of Google search. Because of this, understanding how your brand appears in AI-generated search results is becoming essential for businesses that want to stay visible, competitive, and relevant online.

That’s where SE Visible by SE Ranking comes in. It’s our dedicated AI visibility platform, built on the 13+ years we’ve spent working with search data. Beyond tracking mentions and citations, it helps you understand what shapes your brand’s presence in AI search and where to act next.

SE Visible tracks how your brand and your competitors appear in AI-generated answers across Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, as well as LLMs like ChatGPT and Gemini.

Its key capabilities include:

• Brand visibility and competitor benchmarking. See how often AI engines mention and cite your brand, how they describe it, and how your share of voice compares with competitors’. Each metric opens into the actual AI response behind it, so you can show stakeholders exactly what AI said rather than asking them to trust a score.
• SEO context for cited sources. For each domain AI engines cite, see its traffic, Domain Trust, backlinks, and referring domains. At the page level, check the page’s traffic and whether it links to your site. This shows which sources carry real weight and which are realistic outreach targets.
• Gap analysis. Find the prompts and cited pages where competitors show up and you don’t, and see where AI answers overlap with organic search results.

Not every AI visibility gap is a PR problem. Some need a new page or a technical fix. That’s why SE Visible works alongside SE Ranking, so you can tell whether an opportunity is technical, on-site, content-driven, or external.

AIO share by niche

Based on findings from our May 2025 research study, the niches with the highest percentage of AI Overviews were Relationships (61%), Business (57%), Education (50%), Food & Beverage (46%), and Legal (42%).

By September 2026, the ranking had changed again, and the gap between niches had almost closed. AI Overviews appeared most often for Business (96%), Technology (96%), Finance (93%), Relationships (93%), and Education (92%).

Every one of the 20 niches we track now shows AI Overviews for at least 60% of queries, and 15 of them are above 80%.

The biggest shifts came in niches where AI Overviews barely existed a year earlier:

• E-commerce and Retail went from 2% in May 2025 to 79% in September 2026.
• Fashion and Beauty went from 1% to 60%. It’s still the niche with the lowest AIO rate.
• Finance went from 11% to 93%, an 8x increase.
• Real Estate stayed between 18% and 29% for over a year, then jumped from 27% in August to 81% in September 2026.

Healthcare grew more slowly than most. It held at 79% in both August and September 2026, while other niches kept climbing.

What this shows is that Google expanded AI Overviews beyond informational lifestyle topics into areas with stronger practical intent, such as money, work, and decision-making. By late 2026, that expansion reached shopping, fashion and real estate too.

Queries triggering AIOs

AI Overviews show up for longer, more informational searches. According to our May 2025 study, 10-word queries trigger AI Overviews over 2.5 times more often than four-word searches (69.21% vs. 25.82%).

But query length is only part of the picture. What people are looking for matters, too: are they trying to understand something or ready to make a purchase?

The data points strongly toward the first. According to seoClarity Research, over 96% of queries triggering AIOs have informational intent, while just 1.2% have transactional intent.

That preference for specific, informational searches also shows up when we look at search volume. In our May 2025 study across five US states, AI Overviews became less common as search volume increased. Keywords with 0–10 monthly searches triggered AIOs 30–31% of the time across all five states. This fits the pattern: longer, more specific queries tend to have lower search volumes.

Top domains cited in AIOs

The citation picture also shows which sources Google tends to rely on most often inside AI Overviews.

In our September 2026 dataset, YouTube was the most-cited domain by a wide margin, accounting for 16.15% of all citations analyzed, up from 10.71% in February. Reddit followed with 4.07%, down from its 7.98% peak in August.

The rest of the top 10 were Facebook (3.06%), Wikipedia (1.54%), google.com (1.52%), Instagram (1.41%), Quora (1.18%), Indeed (0.73%), TikTok (0.68%), and Zillow (0.55%).

What stands out here is the mix of source types. Google is not only citing traditional informational websites. It is also pulling heavily from video platforms, community-led discussions, social networks, job sites, marketplaces, government/medical resources, and finance publishers. Five of the top 10 are social or video platforms: YouTube, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.

Two more trends stand out:

• Citations are concentrating. The top 10 domains held 30.89% of all citations in September 2026, up from 17.97% in November 2025. The peak was 33.3% in August.

• Social platforms are a bigger share of sources. They made up 27.8% of all citations in September 2026, up from 12.15% in November 2025. 65.81% of answers cited at least one social source.

The social growth follows a May 2026 update, after which Google began showing snippets from forums, public discussions, and social platforms inside AI Overviews, with links to the full conversations.

Do AI Overviews cite pages that rank organically?

More and more, yes. We checked how many sources in each AI Overview also rank in the top 20 organic results for the same keyword.

In November 2025, 37.87% of AIO sources ranked in the top 20. By September 2026, that share reached 56.38%, after peaking at 62.02% in August. Most of the jump happened in July 2026, from 40.56% to 59.58%, the same month the number of sources per answer fell from 11.4 to 7.84.

Taken together, the data from summer 2026 points one way. AI Overviews now cite fewer sources, more of those sources rank well organically, and more of the citations go to the same few large domains.

AI Overviews vs. AI Mode: different sources

Google now sends users from AI Overviews into AI Mode, but the two features don’t draw on the same pages.

In October 2026, AI Mode cited 9.43 sources per answer on average, compared with 7.66 for AI Overviews. Only 10.12% of AI Mode sources ranked in the top 20 organic results, against 56.38% for AI Overviews in September 2026.

The overlap between the two is small. AI Overviews and AI Mode share only 15.54% of cited domains and 8.63% of exact URLs. In June 2025, those figures were 16% and 10.7%, so the gap has held steady for over a year.

In practice, being cited in an AI Overview tells you little about whether you’ll appear in AI Mode. Each needs to be tracked on its own.

AI Overviews: a full history of updates

• May 2023 – May 2024

On May 10, 2023, Google announced the launch of Search Generative Experience (SGE) — an experimental AI-powered layer on top of Search — during Google I/O. On May 25, 2023, Google opened access to SGE for users who signed up for the waitlist.

From launch until August 2023, SGE was available exclusively in the US and only to Search Labs users. In August 2023, it expanded to India and Japan. By November 2023, it had been rolled out to more than 120 additional countries and territories — still Search Labs only.

May 2024
Google officially launched AI Overviews in search for all users in the U.S. The company said hundreds of millions of people would get access that week, with a goal of reaching more than 1 billion users by the end of 2024. Google also announced new Search Labs capabilities tied to AI Overviews, including multi-step reasoning, meal and trip planning, and video-based search for troubleshooting.

August 2024
Google expanded AI Overviews beyond the U.S. and introduced new Search Labs features around them. One of the biggest additions was the ability to save specific AI Overviews for later, alongside a simplified display that showed pages directly within the overview. Google also said the experiment would support six new countries: the U.K., India, Japan, Indonesia, Mexico, and Brazil.

October 2024
Google rolled out AI Overviews to more than 100 countries and territories, saying the product would now reach more than 1 billion monthly users. At the same time, it expanded language support and highlighted a series of link-display changes designed to send people to the web more easily, including a right-hand source panel on desktop, a similar source access pattern on mobile, and inline links directly in the AI Overview text.

November 2024
Google began bringing ads into AI Overviews for mobile users in the U.S. According to Google Ads documentation, this let Search and Shopping ads appear directly inside AI-generated responses when relevant to the user’s query.

January 2025
Google expanded AI Overviews to more kinds of visual search results for places, trending images, unique objects and more. Google later referenced this January expansion when describing subsequent visual-search improvements.

March 2025
Google upgraded AI Overviews with Gemini 2.0 and expanded access for teens, while also removing the sign-in requirement for many users. Google specifically said the update would help with harder questions, including coding, advanced math, and multimodal queries.

Also in March, Google said it was improving health-related AI Overviews, including broader coverage for thousands more health topics.

Yet, as our 2026 research shows, health-related AI Overviews still turn to YouTube 2–3x more than trusted medical sites.

April 2025
Google made it official that some terms inside AI Overviews could link to additional Google Search results, not just external websites. Google described this as a way to help people explore topics more easily and discover more relevant content.

May 2025
At Google I/O, the company announced a major expansion: AI Overviews became available in more than 200 countries and territories and in more than 40 languages, including newly added support for languages such as Arabic, Chinese, Malay, and Urdu. Google also said AI Overviews were now reaching 1.5 billion users per month.

Google also began bringing a custom version of Gemini 2.5 into both AI Mode and AI Overviews in the U.S., signaling a broader quality upgrade across Search’s AI responses.

At the same time, Google expanded ads in AI Overviews to desktop in the U.S. and said it would later extend them to additional English-language markets on mobile and desktop.

July 2025
Google added the new “Dive deeper with AI Mode” button inside AI Overviews specifically for visual searches within Circle to Search.

By July, Google also said AI Overviews had grown to more than 2 billion monthly users across more than 200 countries and territories and 40 languages.

December 2025
Google has integrated “Dive deeper in AI Mode” (or simply “AI Mode”) as a central feature of its AI Overviews, moving away from experimental Labs-only access to a standard, power-user feature available on mobile.

January 2026
Google upgraded AI Overviews to Gemini 3 and said this new model would become the default globally. It also introduced a new flow where users could tap “Show more” in an AI Overview, ask a follow-up question, and continue directly in AI Mode.

Google later said it had shipped more than 250 product launches across AI Mode and AI Overviews in the previous quarter, which suggests the pace of AI Overview iteration accelerated sharply at the end of 2025. 

February 2026

Google officially rolled out hover pop-up link cards in AI Overviews and AI Mode. 

On desktop, groups of source links now automatically appear in a pop-up when users hover over them, letting them jump directly to a website without extra clicks. 

Alongside this, Google made link icons more descriptive and prominent across both desktop and mobile. Google stated that internal testing showed the new UI is “more engaging, making it easier to get to great content across the web.” 

March 2026

Google’s March core update rolled out from March 27 to April 8. During the rollout, AI Overviews became more common in food searches: across one publisher network’s tracked impressions, they rose from under 20% to 26–31%.

May 2026

On May 6, Google announced five changes to how links appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode. They include more inline links next to supporting passages, highlighted links from publications users subscribe to, and previews of forum and social discussions with creator names.

On May 21, Google started its second core update of the year.

August 2026

On August 28, Google confirmed that some AI Overviews now open at full length instead of the shortened version, for topics where its systems judge that most useful. This pushes organic results further down the page.

September 2026

The SEO community started noticing AI Overviews showing up more often on branded searches. Google hadn’t announced a change, but our own data told a similar story: that month, AIOs appeared for 82.5% of the US branded keywords we tracked.

Wrapping up

AI Overviews are constantly evolving. Google adds new elements, changes the design, removes unnecessary features, expands locations, and more. To keep optimizing your content effectively, stay on top of these updates.

To do so, simply revisit this article periodically. It will always have the latest updates.

Written by

Yulia Deda

Yulia is an SEO and Content Marketing Expert at SE Ranking, where she dives deep into the worlds of SEO, AI, and digital marketing. Her passion is making industry research easy to understand and practical for everyday marketing. Outside of work, Yulia enjoys long walks, cozy evenings with friends, and exploring different cultures through food and travel.