#ai-overviews

#ai-overviews

There are times that sites hit by a manual action, and deindexed, were still showing up in AI Overviews or AI Mode for a few days. There was a lag in the pipeline for some reason, which was super weird. Well, I was checking a site that just got nuked and they are NOT showing in AIOs or AI Mode at all. So I think Google implemented something there to align the various surfaces, including AI experiences like AIOs and AI Mode. Just an interesting observation.

Google's AI Overviews are already reshaping AI visibility for home service providers. This industry-focused analysis of 237,990 home service queries found that AI Overviews appear in 17.7% of searches. While that's lower than high-risk verticals like health (51% across 130,070 queries) or finance (31.1% across 116,124 queries), it still poses a major challenge concerning AI in the home repair industry.

YouTube is now a ranking asset in AI discovery, and you can lose share even if website traffic looks stable. YouTube is highly machine-readable (transcripts, metadata, chapters) and tends to be a low-risk source for AI to summarize and cite.

Over three decades, Google designed and delivered a search engine where credible and accessible health content could rise to the top of the results. Searching online for information wasn't perfect, but it usually worked well. Users had a good chance of clicking through to a credible health website that answered their query. AI Overviews replaced that richness with a clinical-sounding summary that gives an illusion of definitiveness. It's a very seductive swap, but not a responsible one. And this often ends the information-seeking journey prematurely.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web. The Google search ranking volatility remained heated through the weekend. A new study says Google AI Overviews clicks are shifting from organic clicks to paid clicks. Google warned about serving "not available" content with JavaScript.

Aleyda Solis posted on her blog Search Isn't Just Turning to AI, it's being Re-Monetized: Text Ads Are Taking a Bigger Share of Google SERP Clicks (Data) - the data she showed that for some e-commerce related queries that the clicks are going away from organic/free listings and to paid/product search ad listings. "Classic organic click share dropped in every single vertical... but the most consistent "winner" wasn't AI. It was Text Ads (and PLAs in product categories)," she wrote on X.

Google confirmed there is a bug with AI Overviews not showing links for some responses. The bug was spotted by Lily Ray, who posted some examples several hours ago. Rajan Patel, Google's VP, Engineering for Search, replied saying it is a bug and Google is working on fixing it. Here is a screenshot of the AI Overviews missing any citations or links from Lily Ray on X: Rajan Patel replied saying, "Thanks for flagging, this is a bug and we're working on a fix."

From the AI's point of view, all of this content exists in the same pool.

Google's search feature AI Overviews cites YouTube more than any medical website when answering queries about health conditions, according to research that raises fresh questions about a tool seen by 2 billion people each month. The company has said its AI summaries, which appear at the top of search results and use generative AI to answer questions from users, are reliable and cite reputable medical sources such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Mayo Clinic.