Google AI Overviews
Google AI Overviews are the AI-generated summaries Google places above the traditional blue links, synthesising an answer from multiple ranking web pages and citing a handful of them, so a query can be resolved on the results page without the user clicking through.
AI Overviews draw on the same crawled, indexed web that powers ordinary search results, then have a model stitch a short answer together from several sources. To be eligible to feed or be cited in one, a page still has to clear the old gates: it must be crawlable HTML rather than text locked inside images or scripts, it should be indexed, and structured data such as Product, Review, and FAQ schema helps Google read what the page actually claims. There is no separate AI Overviews submission; if the page cannot rank, it cannot be cited.
The practical impact is on clicks. When the answer sits at the top of the page, fewer people scroll to the links below, so a position-one ranking can still lose traffic to the overview above it. Informational queries are hit hardest; queries with clear commercial or transactional intent, where shoppers want to compare and buy, tend to keep more click-through.
For product and brand queries, the gap is usually that the supporting evidence is not in a form Google can read or trust. Getting existing reviews rendered as crawlable text, corroborated across sources, and marked up with schema is the work that makes a store eligible to be summarised and cited, which is the gap BetterReviews is built to close.