What Makes Google’s AI Overviews Tick? | Brafton

Since its release in May 2024, Google’s AI Overviews — AIO for short — have become a mainstay and more frequently appearing panel on search engine results pages (SERPs).

From a user perspective, AIOs have their fans and certainly their haters; however, from a business point of view, they hold the most coveted SERP real estate that you can win … for free. AIOs stake their claim in position zero — above organic results and even sponsored content.

That said, there’s a bit of mystery about how Google’s algorithms choose which links to show in AIOs. A few Braftonites behind the scenes have been digging into AI Overviews to discover what makes them tick. Here’s what they’ve found out.

AIOs vs. Traditional SERP Features

AIOs are different from any other SERP feature we’ve seen before. While they’re seemingly comparable to Featured Snippets in terms of placement and content, they’re more unique — both in how they work and what they show.

AI Overviews

Google’s AI Overviews (formerly called Search Generative Experience or SGE) use generative AI to synthesize answers from multiple sources, presenting a concise, AI-generated response at the top of search results. The results shown may or may not link to sources, but in our experience, they mostly do.

AIOs offer a conversational and detailed answer, often reducing the need to click multiple links to contextualize the answer, even though more than one link is typically presented. Users get synthesized information from various sources in one view.

Featured Snippets

Unlike AIOs, Featured Snippets are brief, direct excerpts from a single webpage that Google selects as the best answer to a query. From a user perspective, Featured Snippets provide a quick answer to a query but often require users to click the link for added context.

Pre-AIOs, winning Featured Snippets was a top priority for most search engine optimizers (SEOs). It still is, since Featured Snippets haven’t been replaced entirely, but AIOs are increasingly present on SERPs, meaning a change in strategy is in order.

SERP Feature Frequency

Data from Semrush estimates that AI Overviews appear on SERPs nearly 8% of the time across all topical categories, whereas Featured Snippets — once SERP royalty — appear about 3% of the time. Percentages for AIOs fluctuated slightly over the past month, ranging from about six to just north of 10%, while Featured Snippets remained steady at around 3%.

The top five topical categories where an AIO is present are:

• Travel: 14.6%.
• Computers & Electronics: 15.9%.
• Health: 23%.
• Science: 25%.
• People & Society: 25.3%.

Meanwhile, a study from Advanced Web Rankings that analyzed 8,000 keywords found AIOs appeared 12.4% of the time. The industries most frequently producing one of these SERP features:

• Health: 85%.
• Safety: 73%.
• Technology: 70%.
• Education: 68%.
• Legal: 62%.
• SEO: 61% .

SEO is an interesting one; most of these categories represent YMYL (Your Money, Your Life) topics, or subjects that Google treats with utmost importance. SEO, on the other hand, rarely impacts any individual’s money or life — yet there it is. Could it be Google catering to the audience most likely to obsess over this feature?

What We’ve Learned About How AIO Picks Its Linked Content

Brafton SEO experts have spent countless hours analyzing keywords and SERPs that return AIOs to learn how Google’s algorithms choose links to serve users. While Google has said that businesses don’t necessarily have to do anything different to get picked up by an AIO, our experts found that these particular elements may give you a better chance at appearing:

1. The Type of Query Matters

AIOs don’t appear on every SERP, for every query — at least not yet. We’ve found that informational queries — more specifically, definition-type searches — elicit an AIO more often than other searches.

Users making informational queries are seeking knowledge or answers. These types of searches often include keywords like “how,” “why,” “what,” or “what are,” so content that directly and succinctly answers questions or relays definitions is a major factor in AIOs’ inner workings.

2. Ranking Keywords Are King

Google’s AI Overviews abide by the general principle of providing comprehensive answers by drawing from a wide range of relevant sources. Our experts found that the more keywords you’re ranking for on Google in general, the more likely you are to appear in AIOs.

That doesn’t necessarily mean pages need to be in the Top 3 positions — or even on Page 1 — to be included. We found that pages with sub-optimal rankings were being sourced for AIOs anyway. This is congruent with Advanced Web Rankings’ finding that 46.5% of URLs included were found outside of the top 50 organic results.

3. Don’t Forget Your Schema Markup

Philip Weafer, Director of SEO at Brafton and one of the leads on discovering the characteristics of AIOs noted, “Defined term schema was directly correlated with AIO appearances, especially in informational queries.” Implementing schema markup to provide Google with clear and concise information about your content may improve your chances of being selected for both featured snippets and AI Overviews.

4. Semantic SEO

According to our experts, AIOs favor concise and semantically similar content. This moves the needle even further away from expired strategies like keyword stuffing — which can actively harm your SEO — and more toward understanding and developing semantic relationships between words and concepts. Using synonyms, related terms and contextual language can help you build a robust network of related keywords that may improve your chances of scoring a place in AIOs.

5. Backlinks and Referring Domains

Throughout our analyses, we discovered that backlinks and referring domains seem to play a sizeable role in appearing in AI Overviews:

• Backlinks: On average, featured page links in AIO had 31% more backlinks than those that don’t appear.
• Referring Domains: Pages featured in an AIO, on average, had about 30% more referring domains than those that don’t appear.

6. Domain Rating (DR) and URL Rating (UR)

When it comes to DR and UR, our experts discovered a 4-point difference in Top DR for pages ranking in AIOs compared to pages that were not featured.

UR is a measure of a page’s authority calculated by Ahrefs. Similarly to DR, URs were 6% higher, on average, for AIO-featured pages than those that were not included.

AIO’s Impact on Organic Traffic

Because Google’s AI Overviews easily support zero-click searches, many have speculated that appearing in an AIO would lead to a decrease in organic traffic. This is a somewhat controversial topic, with media outlets reporting the full spectrum of possibilities:

• Search Engine Land says AI Overviews will decrease traffic.
• Martech says AIOs have little impact on traffic.
• Conductor reports that AIOs have a positive impact on website traffic.

If, in fact, pages are earning traffic from AIOs, folks are still compelled to click through even though they’re a more comprehensive SERP resource than Featured Snippets. Perhaps it’s because users are fact-checking the generated content for accuracy.

During our research, our experts discovered that pages featured in AIOs have nearly 6x the amount of organic traffic than those that aren’t. That’s what our data told us, but this may be your classic “chicken and egg” problem: Did our high-traffic pages earn their spot in AIO due to traffic (and whatever other factors are supporting traffic) or are they getting traffic from AIO?

The answer is unclear right now, and Google provides little help — there’s no direct way to track traffic from AIOs. Your best bet is to track traffic to pages that are known to appear in AIOs. You can find that out using keyword tracking tools such as Ahrefs or Semrush. Here’s how that looks in Ahrefs:

Final Thoughts

AIOs — and artificial intelligence in general — are rapidly changing. That makes it difficult to home in on a steadfast strategy to guarantee rank like we can with more traditional search engine optimization. That said, these revelations uncovered by our experts are the beginnings of a clearer pathway to optimizing for AIO, and Brafton has already begun to put these findings to work for several clients to help them make AIO gains.

As we learn more about how AIOs work, we’ll continue adapting and advising on the latest and most effective approaches for winning that coveted position zero — as we’ve always done.