As soon as I heard about AI overviews (AIOs) in 2023, I was worried. What will happen to our organic visibility, and how can I make sure we’ll be featured in AIOs?
For context: I’m based in Europe, and work at a B2B SaaS company, Trustmary. It has paying customers from over 80 countries globally. My main responsibility is to get signups and paid customers from organic sources.
We focus on global markets, but we’re in an area which doesn’t yet have AIOs, so I’ve had to take a few extra steps to future-proof our organic visibility strategy. First of all, I follow SEO experts who write about AIOs on LinkedIn and use a VPN to test the feature in the States.
Next up, I’ll go over AIOs briefly, after which I’ll focus on showing how you can reverse engineer your content into those snippets. Lastly, and most importantly, I’ll explain how to talk about AIOs to stakeholders.
To me, AI overviews are just another rich snippet. Just like People Also Asked and the About snippet.
Here’s an example of an “About” snippet.
Here’s Google’s official definition for AIOs:
AI Overviews appear in Google Search results when our systems determine that generative responses can be especially helpful — for example, when you want to quickly understand information from a range of sources, including information from across the web and Google's Knowledge Graph. No action is needed for publishers to benefit from AI Overviews.
When they were first introduced in May 2024, there was a lot of controversy for giving false and even dangerous answers.
Here’s a great example of a funny one from Lily Ray who has been one of the most vocal voices on criticizing the false information present in AIOs.
Since then, AIOs have become somewhat more reliable, but they spark up a lot of hate from users on the Google Support. A staggering 568 people have the same question “How do I turn AIOs off?”
Nevertheless, Google announced late October 2024 that AIOs are made available in 100 different countries and territories and new languages are being supported as well.
There’s a high chance that your business will be impacted by them already, or sometime in the near future.
Let’s check if that is the case for you.
If you use any rank tracking tools like SpyFu, SEMrush or Ahrefs, you can do this in your tool automatically.
However, it’s best to test things by yourself manually first and not over-rely on tools. Tools are great for doing things in bulk, but aim to understand AIOs first before relying on tools for keeping you informed.
Sidenote: Ranking tools are great, but their nature of crawling SERPs only periodically instead of daily can lead to a gap in what they hare vs what is current on the SERPs. Tools offer a snapshot, but not a real-time representation of your organic visibility.
If AIOs aren’t present with these queries, stop worrying about them. Repeat this process in a few months to see if something has changed.
I recommend checking all “How to” queries though. They are typically featured in AIOs.
After you have seen with your own eyes what gets featured on the AI overviews, have a look at your notes.
Take a closer look at which of your competitors are featured in AIOs, and which are the common aspects that earn a spot in AIOs.
Is it a certain content type like FAQs? Is it images? Are they answering the questions better than you? Is it bullet-point lists?
Here’s what I did back in April 2024 when I wanted to know how the SERPs looked like in the US.
I repeated steps one and two after three weeks, and was pleased to see that we started appearing in the AIOs
Adding those quick steps as a bullet-point list with H2 above them was all it took for this particular case in our niche.
Figure out what is relevant in your niche.
I do get why the steps were featured in AIOs. They are providing users helpful information which is what they’re looking for with this particular query.
In hindsight, I think adding these steps to all of the above-mentioned articles made sense from the users’ point of view, and I feel silly not thinking about that earlier, but oh well.
Disclaimer: Only add things to your site that you think will help users. Not just to rank in AIOs.
My prediction was that one needs to rank at least in the top 20 to be featured in the AIOs. I’ve been proven wrong multiple times during the past 6 months.
We use SEMrush to track our rankings, and luckily it has AIO tracking as well.
As I’m writing this, we’re in the midst of the November Google Core Update, so bear that in mind. However, I’ve seen this pattern over the course of the last few months so many times that I have no trouble sharing these insights.
For “how to get google reviews for my business” we currently rank on place 41 organically. However, we’re featured in the AIOs.
Mind you, this isn’t the first time. The lowest organic ranking I can remember seeing has been from ranking 59 organically, and then to AIOs the next day.
Others follow the hypothesis that you should be in the top 20 organically to be featured in AIOs.
Next, I’ll list a few of my ideas on the reasons why a brand might be featured in AIOs.
These are just my two cents, but I’d put the most focus on building your brand, personal brand for the authors in your blog, and creating high-quality unique content.
The way AIOs are reported in the tool we use means that if we appear there, it’s equivalent to ranking 1st for that query.
However, that’s not fully true. There have been some investigations into the correlation between AIOs and traffic, where it’s stated that “it depends on the query and industry in question” if people click on the links in AIOs and actually land on the website the information is from.
One key thing to note is that your ranking performance will be more volatile when AIOs are present. Some days it might look ✨amazing ✨ when you’ve just increased your ranking from 59 to 1, and other days when you lost that, it looks like your performance took a nose-dive.
I mean just look at these graphs. The changes seem dramatic, but in reality, our traffic to those pages has stayed fairly stable and consistent.
In all honesty, I never report anything about AIOs to our CMO or anyone else.
My work is measured with SaaS SEO metrics, which means signups, active users and money brought in from organic traffic. All other SEO metrics are for me to understand and improve.
I’m not too good at setting up dashboards, but luckily some brilliant people from Flow Agency have created a Looker Dashboard for LLM traffic. This gives a great overview of how your domain gets traffic from different sources.
