AI Overviews: How it Works & How to Optimize for It

How to Optimize for AI Overviews

Tips for Optimizing Your Content for AI Overviews

Really, we wouldn’t suggest changing your overall SEO strategy, but there are a few tweaks we recommend in the way you write and publish new or under-performing content if you want to rank in AI Overviews results:

• Ensure your content is relevant to searches that appear most in AI Overviews. TIP: Use a tool like this AI Overviews Visualizer to measure your content’s relevancy to your target searches.
• Use authoritative tone of voice, quotes, and statistics, which are more likely to appear in large language model outputs.
• Break up your content into approximately 700-character segments. Smaller segments of copy are more likely to get picked up by large language models (LLMs).

Tips for Optimizing for Shopping AI Overviews

Shopping AI Overviews pulls information largely from Google’s Shopping Graph, which is a real-time data set of more than 35 billion product listings. The Shopping Graph pulls detailed information about each product, including product availability, ratings and reviews, sizes, colors, materials, and more, helping online shoppers to find products down to every detailed search criteria.

• Include complete, detailed information for every product and share those on your Google Merchant feed.
• Solicit quality product ratings and reviews
• Generate “buzz” about your product on third-party sites (think: subreddits, and influencer or affiliate sites).

Tips for Optimizing for Local AI Overviews

Local AI Overviews pulls from much of the same sources of information as the Google Map does, with a few exceptions. Those sources include directories, but also other sources, like local subreddits and local “best of” lists.

• Ensure you are listed on major and niche industry directory listings and map results.
• Consider a local PR push to land local “best of” awards and generate buzz about your location locally.

Tools to Better Optimize for AI Overviews

There are several tools to help measure and improve your results using AI Overviews. Here are a few:

• Ziptie syncs directly with your Google Search Console account to generate actionable data to improve your website rank and monitor your AI Overviews performance.
• MarketBrew’s AI Overviews Visualizer analyzes meta titles to help you better understand how Google perceives them. It can also help you identify gaps in your content’s relevance to a particular topic and make necessary adjustments to improve its chances of being featured in AI Overviews.
• The popular SEO tool, SEMRush has built in tools to help you monitor your website’s visibility within AI Overviews. 

Should You Shift Your SEO Strategy for AI Overviews?

Shifting your SEO strategy to prioritize AI Overviews can offer enhanced visibility and engagement with AI-powered search engines. However, it’s crucial to consider potential risks before making major changes to your SEO strategy — especially if things are working well.

The Risks

Algorithm Changes

Search engine algorithms are constantly evolving. Over-reliance on AI Overviews might leave your content vulnerable to algorithm updates, potentially leading to a drop in rankings if the optimization strategy is not adaptable.

“They’ve been rolling it back. There has been no reliability in terms of how Google is playing this out,” said Sussman. “Initially, they rolled it out all over the place. They got all sorts of controversial AI-generated results that got them a lot of bad press, and they rolled it way back.”

Limited Reach

While AI Overviews are gaining prominence, they may not be the primary mode of search for all users. At the time of writing, Google’s AI Overviews is only appearing in fewer than 10% of all search queries. Focusing solely on this format might limit your reach to a narrower audience segment, so spending too much time catering to this new and evolving feature, may be more risky than beneficial.

Changing Features

Just in the limited public lifespan of AI Overviews, they have deployed features, like a follow-up questions feature, that they have since removed. Spinning your wheels trying to optimize for each new feature, only for it to be taken away within the month, may be valuable strategy time wasted until the tool’s features become more settled.

Potential Keyword Ranking Trade-offs

There is the risk that if you’re modifying existing content that is ranking organically for AI Overviews that you trade off your organic rank for AI Overviews, which may generate more clicks.

If your content is ranking organically in SERPs for high priority keywords, we do not advise you modify that ranking content to also try to capture AI Overviews, as you may tank your rankings in organic results without actually gaining any benefit in the AI Overviews snippet. If you have non-ranking content, by all means, take that risk as there’s nothing to lose.

The Importance of a Holistic SEO Strategy

Whether you decide to incorporate an AI Overviews targeted approach into your SEO strategy or not, we always recommend the adoption of a holistic SEO approach that combines AI optimization with strategies that cater to tried and true SEO methods that are proven to be successful for your brand.

We also advise our clients to take measured risks. For example, let’s not fix what isn’t broken. If something is working (i.e. ranking in the top spots in Google’s SERP), let’s leave that part of the strategy alone. However, if a particular keyword is not gaining traction using traditional methods, why not give optimization for AI Overviews, specifically, a go? 

Regularly monitoring algorithm changes and adapting your strategy accordingly is also crucial for long-term success.