AI Overviews: What They Are and How to Measure

In Brazil, where we are based, people search for the feature by its Portuguese name, “visão geral criada por IA.” Among the related questions, someone wants to know how to turn it off. The first organic link is Google’s own help page, and its snippet already answers: you can’t. ¹ ²

On the other side of the screen sits the site owner, with other questions. Does the summary show up in my customers’ searches? Does it cite my page? Where do I see that?

This page covers the feature itself, as a product. What Google says it is, when it reached each place, where ads come in, how to measure it, and how to control it. No line here promises that your page will appear in it.

What an AI Overview is

Think of the coworker who went to the meeting you missed. He tells you, in five lines, what each person said. Below that, he notes where each idea came from. If you want detail, you call whoever said it.

At the top of many Google searches, a text written by AI plays that role. It sums up the topic and shows links to the pages that support the summary. This is called an AI Overview. ³

Google’s documentation for site owners describes the feature this way. AI Overviews help people get to the gist of a complicated topic or question more quickly. They also offer a jumping-off point to explore links and learn more. ³

Google’s Search Help adds a warning worth reading word for word: “AI Overviews can and will make mistakes.” ²

The neighbor with a similar name is a different product. AI Mode opens a conversation for questions that call for reasoning and complex comparisons. ³ Google warns that the two may use different models and techniques. That is why the responses and links vary from one to the other. ³

On September 14, 2026, we searched “ai overview” on Google in Brazil. The page opened with an AI Overview about itself. ¹ It defined itself in English, on a results page set to Portuguese, with Wikipedia among its sources. And it said it shows up in “position zero,” above the blue links. ¹ Keep that phrase in mind. It comes back when we get to measurement.

When Google shows the summary, and when it does not

The documentation states Google’s rule. AI Overviews appear only when Google’s systems determine they are additive to classic Search. And so, Google writes, they often don’t trigger. ³

The Google Ads help describes the same ground from the advertiser’s side. The summary generally appears on searches with no one right answer. ⁴ Think of complex questions, or searches where it helps to pull information together from several pages. ⁴

To build the answer, the system may run several related searches across subtopics. Google calls this query fan-out. ³ The mechanism, with the example Google gives, is in the piece on how to show up in AI answers.

Outside measurement found a similar pattern. Athena Chapekis and Anna Lieb, of the Pew Research Center, tracked the browsing of 900 American adults in March 2025. They published the results on July 22, 2025. About 18% of the Google searches in the study produced an AI summary. ⁵

In a version of the study posted in August 2026, the authors listed what makes a summary more likely. Longer queries, queries that begin with a question word, and queries with both a noun and a verb. ⁶

These numbers come from the United States. I know of no equivalent measurement for Brazil, where we are based, with a published method.

When AI Overviews arrived, and where

May 2024, the United States. On May 14, 2024, Elizabeth Reid, Google’s VP of Search, announced the feature for everyone in the U.S. The post promised more countries soon. ⁷

August 2024, six more countries. On August 15, 2024, Google’s blog announced six new countries. They were the United Kingdom, India, Japan, Indonesia, Mexico, and Brazil, each with local language support. ⁸ The same post said the expansion would roll out gradually, over several weeks. ⁸

October 2024, more than 100 countries. Srinivasan Venkatachary, Google’s VP of Search Quality, announced more than 100 countries and territories on October 28, 2024. ⁹ Anyone in a country with the feature could now get it in any supported language, Spanish and Portuguese among them. ⁹

May 2025, more than 200 countries. The mark of more than 200 countries and territories, in more than 40 languages, came on May 20, 2025. Hema Budaraju, Google’s VP of Product Management for Search, made the announcement. ¹⁰

September 2025, AI Mode in five more languages. On September 8, 2025, AI Mode added five new languages, Brazilian Portuguese among them. ¹¹

August 2026, the site owner’s dashboard. On August 31, 2026, Search Console rolled out the Generative AI performance report to all sites. ¹² The same day, it rolled out the control for inclusion in those features. ¹³

The earlier story, from featured snippets to AI answers, is on the page about answer engine optimization.

Where ads show up in AI Overviews

Ads arrived early. In October 2024, Google already said ads inside the summary were running on mobile in the U.S. ⁹

Today, the Google Ads help describes two placements. The first sits around the summary, above or below it. That one is available in all of the more than 200 markets where the feature exists. ⁴

The second sits inside the summary. On the help page as read on September 14, 2026, that format runs only in English, in twelve countries. It works on mobile and desktop. ⁴ They are Australia, Canada, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Malaysia, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Singapore, and the United States. ⁴ If you advertise in the U.S., your ads are eligible for that spot. Brazil, where we are based, is not on the list.

To choose the ad inside, the system weighs both the query and the content of the summary. ⁴ Sensitive verticals stay out, such as adult content, alcohol, gambling, finance, healthcare, and politics. ⁴

Two answers on the same help page matter to anyone who measures. Advertisers cannot target the inside placement directly, and they cannot opt out of it. ⁴ And Google Ads offers no separate report for that placement. An ad shown there is reported as a top ad. ⁴

How to measure AI Overviews in Search Console and GA4

The usual Performance report. The documentation says sites that appear in AI features are included in overall Search Console traffic. They show up in the Performance report, under the “Web” search type. ³

The Search Console help explains the count. Clicking a link to an external page inside the summary counts as a click. ¹⁴ And the whole summary occupies a single position in the results. All of its links get that same number. ¹⁴ The “position zero” the summary claims to hold becomes, in the report, one position shared by all of its links.

The Generative AI performance report. Search’s AI features got a report of their own, rolled out to all sites on August 31, 2026. ¹² It adds up impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode. An impression, in the help page’s definition, is each time a link to your site was shown in one of these features. ¹² You can group the data by page, country, date, and device. ¹²

Now, what it does not separate. The help page describes impressions and says nothing about clicks. It does not list the query as a dimension either. ¹² And none of the dimensions separates AI Overviews from AI Mode. Both go into the same count. ¹²

If the report does not show up, the help page gives two reasons. The site may not have enough impressions in these features, or it may have been excluded in the control. ¹²

GA4. In Google Analytics 4, the help page on the default channel group says the Organic Search channel includes AI Overviews and AI Mode. ¹⁵ The AI Assistant channel, which receives visits from ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot, excludes both. ¹⁵ In practice, a visit from Google’s summary gets mixed in with a visit from a blue link.

Put the three screens together and the picture gets honest. Search Console counts how often your link appeared in the summary, without saying for which query. ¹² The “Web” report adds the summary’s click to the regular result’s click. ³ ¹⁴ GA4 does the same with the visit. ¹⁵ Anyone who promises the exact number of clicks from AI Overviews needs to show where it came from.

Bing shows more detail on citations in Copilot, in its AI Performance report. It is another search engine, with another yardstick.

How to control AI Overviews, and what each control costs

Every control on this list takes something away. The useful question is what it takes along with it.

The nosnippet rule. Placed on a page, it hides the text snippet in all of Google’s results. The specification lists web search, Images, Discover, AI Overviews, and AI Mode. ¹⁶ It also keeps the content from serving as a direct input for AI Overviews and AI Mode. ¹⁶ The cost: your blue link loses its description too.

The max-snippet rule. With it, you set the maximum number of characters in the snippet. It applies to the same surfaces, plus the Assistant. It also limits how much of the text goes into the summary as direct input. ¹⁶ The cost: the snippet gets shorter in the regular result as well.

The specification carries one exception to that limit. It does not apply when the publisher granted permission another way, such as in-page structured data or a license agreement with Google. ¹⁶

The data-nosnippet attribute. It marks a part of the page that stays out of snippets. ¹⁶ Google’s documentation on AI features includes it in the list of controls. ³ The cost is local. That part disappears from snippets in every kind of result.

The Search Console control. Here the decision applies to the whole property, which drops out of Search’s generative AI features. ¹³ A site that opts out gets no traffic or impressions from those features. ¹³ The biggest cost sits in one sentence of the help page. Content from other sites stays available there, and it may look similar to yours. ¹³ The full reading of this control is in the piece on the four gates, linked above.

The same help page clears up two fears. The control is not used as a ranking signal for the rest of Search. ¹³ And it does not touch model training, which has its own tool, Google-Extended. ¹³

The noindex rule. It removes the page from Search entirely. ³ ¹³ For someone who only wanted out of the summary, it is far too strong a remedy.

A word on timing. After you switch the Search Console setting, the exclusion generally takes a few days. ¹³ With page-level rules, Google needs to recrawl. That can take anywhere from several days to several months. ³

What happens to clicks when an AI Overview appears

Google argues that the summary sends good traffic. In the May 2024 announcement, it said links inside AI Overviews get more clicks than the same page as a traditional listing. ⁷ The December 2025 documentation says clicks from pages with AI Overviews are higher quality. By Google’s account, people are more likely to spend more time on the site. ³ Neither text publishes a sample or numbers.

Pew measured from the outside, in the United States, in March 2025. With a summary on screen, people clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits. Without one, they did so in 15%. ⁵ A click on a link inside the summary happened in 1% of visits. ⁵ And browsing ended right there on 26% of pages with a summary, against 16% of pages without one. ⁵

In the August 2026 version, the authors controlled for each panelist and for query traits. The association between summaries and fewer clicks held. ⁶ It is a measured association, with no proof of cause.

Ahrefs, an SEO tool company, measured something else, with another method. Ryan Law and Xibeijia Guan compared 300,000 keywords. Half had an AI Overview on screen, and half were informational queries without one. ¹⁷ They used the average desktop click-through rate, drawn from aggregated Search Console data. ¹⁷

With data from December 2025, the top-ranking page had a 58% lower average click-through rate when a summary was present. ¹⁷ It is a correlation, measured only in the first position. The post does not state the country of the sample. ¹⁷

The same company published an edition in April 2025, also by Ryan Law, with 34.5%. ¹⁸ It used the same sample design. Do not read the two numbers as a curve. The first edition spans one year, and the second spans two. And the list of keywords with a summary was built in different months. ¹⁷ ¹⁸ Ahrefs itself writes that the effect seems to have worsened. ¹⁷ With different windows, I keep each snapshot on its own date.

The bigger picture of zero-click search, with SparkToro’s measurement, is on the page about the first page of Google.

What to do from today on

From now on, when someone brings up AI Overviews, you have four questions to keep apart. Does the summary show up in my customers’ searches? Are there ads around it? Which report shows it to me? Which control is worth its cost?

Nobody guarantees your page a spot in the summary. The documentation says indexing and serving are not guaranteed. ³

The first step takes fifteen minutes. Open Search Console and find the Generative AI performance report. ¹² Write down the date, the total impressions, and the five pages with the most impressions.

Then search Google for the five questions your front desk hears most. Next to each one, mark whether the summary appeared, whether there was an ad, and whom it cited. The rest of the work in this section is in SEO for AI.

Frequently asked questions

Can you turn off AI Overviews on Google?

For searchers, no. Google’s help calls the feature a core part of Search, like knowledge panels. It says these features cannot be turned off. ² The “Web” filter, chosen after you search, shows only text-based links, without the summary. ²

Are AI Overviews and AI Mode the same thing?

No. Google writes that the two may use different models and techniques, and that responses and links vary. ³ In the Generative AI performance report in Search Console, though, both go into the same impression count. ¹²

Are there ads inside AI Overviews in the United States?

Yes, according to the Google Ads help read on September 14, 2026. Ads inside the summary run in English, in twelve countries, and the U.S. is one of them. Brazil is not. ⁴ Above or below the summary, ads can appear in every market that has the feature. ⁴

Does excluding my site in the Search Console control remove it from Google?

No. The help page says the control applies only to generative AI features. It is not a signal for the rest of Search. ¹³ To leave Search entirely, the same help page points to the noindex rule. ¹³

Does Search Console show how many clicks came from AI Overviews?

Not separately. A click on a link in the summary counts as a click in the Performance report, under the “Web” type, along with the others. ³ ¹⁴ The Generative AI performance report, going by the help page’s description, covers impressions. ¹²

Notes and sources

SEO Genome measurement, September 14, 2026, in two readings, in Brazil, where we are based. Semrush, Brazil database: “ai overview” with 720 searches a month and keyword difficulty 65; the top ten organic results are about the feature, three of them Google pages; “visão geral criada por ia” (the Portuguese name of the feature) with 1,300 searches a month, with two tutorials on turning it off in the top ten; the report does not state the capture date. Google in Brazil, live, with Portuguese as the language, Brazil as the country, and the parameter that asks for non-personalized results, in a browser signed in to an account, from a single location. For “ai overview”: the AI Overview at the top, labeled “Visão geral criada por IA” in the Portuguese interface and written in English, with Wikipedia among its sources and the passage “They show up in “position zero” above traditional organic blue links”; no ads on the screen; the related search “AI overview turn off”. For “visão geral criada por ia”: the related question “Como desativar a visão geral criada por IA do Google?” (How do I turn off Google’s AI Overview?) and, first among the web links, Google’s help page with the passage “Não é possível desativar esses recursos” (These features cannot be turned off).
Google Search Help, “Find information in faster & easier ways with AI Overviews in Google Search,” https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/14901683?hl=en. Accessed September 14, 2026. Passages: “AI Overviews can and will make mistakes.”; “AI Overviews are a core Google Search feature, like knowledge panels. Features cannot be turned off. However, you can select the Web filter after you perform a search. This filter displays only text-based links without features like AI Overviews.” Brazil and Portuguese appear in the availability list. The Portuguese version carries a notice that it was translated with AI technology, which is why this page cites the English.
Google Search Central, “AI features and your website,” https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features, page last updated December 10, 2025; Portuguese version, “Recursos de IA e seu site,” updated December 31, 2025. Accessed September 14, 2026. Passages from the English: “AI Overviews help people get to the gist of a complicated topic or question more quickly, and provide a jumping off point to explore links to learn more”; AI Mode is “particularly helpful for queries where further exploration, reasoning, or complex comparisons are needed”; the “query fan-out” technique, which issues multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources (the original sets that description off with dashes, so this page paraphrases it); “AI Mode and AI Overviews may use different models and techniques, so the set of responses and links they show will vary”; “AI Overviews are only shown when our systems determine that it is additive to classic Search, and as such, often don’t trigger”; “Indexing and serving isn’t guaranteed”; sites in AI features “are included in the overall search traffic in Search Console”, reported “within the “Web” search type”; clicks from pages with AI Overviews “are higher quality (meaning, users are more likely to spend more time on the site)”; the nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet, and noindex controls; and crawling that “can take anywhere from several days to several months”. The Portuguese version calls the feature “Visões gerais criadas por IA” and query fan-out “ramificação de consultas”.
Google Ads Help, “About ads and AI Overviews,” https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/16297775?hl=en. Accessed September 14, 2026. The page carries no last-updated date. Passages: “Ads are eligible to show above or below the AI Overview in all 200+ markets where AI Overviews are available.”; “Ads in AI Overviews are currently available in English on mobile and desktop devices in the following countries: Australia, Canada, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Malaysia, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, and US.”; “Both the user query as well as the content of the AI Overview are considered when serving these ads.”; “we don’t show ads in AI Overviews for sensitive verticals like adult, alcohol, gambling, finance, healthcare, politics, and more.”; “AI Overviews trigger on queries which are generally “no one right answer” queries”; “you can’t directly target ad placements in the AI Overviews”; “you can’t opt out of serving ads in AI Overviews”; “ads in AI Overviews are reported as Top Ads”; and “Google Ads currently doesn’t offer segmented reporting when ads show within Search AI Overviews.”
Athena Chapekis and Anna Lieb, “Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results,” Pew Research Center, July 22, 2025, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-users-are-less-likely-to-click-on-links-when-an-ai-summary-appears-in-the-results/. Accessed September 14, 2026. Base: browsing data from 900 U.S. adults in March 2025. Passages: “Some 18% of all the Google searches in our study generated an AI summary”; “Users who encountered an AI summary clicked on a traditional search result link in 8% of all visits. Those who did not encounter an AI summary clicked on a search result nearly twice as often (15% of visits).”; a click on a link in the summary in “just 1% of all visits”; and browsing that ended on “26% of pages with an AI summary, compared with 16% of pages with only traditional search results.”
Athena Chapekis, Anna Lieb, Sono Shah, and Aaron Smith, “Investigating Click Behaviors On Google Search Result Pages That Produce an AI Overview,” arXiv 2608.04831, submitted August 5, 2026, presented at IC2S2 2026, https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04831. Accessed September 14, 2026. Same base of 900 U.S. adults. Attributes that make a summary more likely: “the length of a query, whether the query begins with a question word, and whether the query contains both a noun and verb”. And: “these associations hold when controlling for random effects by panelist and query attributes that make AI Overviews more likely to appear.”
Elizabeth Reid, “Generative AI in Search: Let Google do the searching for you,” official Google blog, May 14, 2024, https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/search/generative-ai-google-search-may-2024/. Accessed September 14, 2026. Passages: “today, AI Overviews will begin rolling out to everyone in the U.S., with more countries coming soon” and “the links included in AI Overviews get more clicks than if the page had appeared as a traditional web listing for that query.”
Hema Budaraju, “New ways to connect to the web with AI Overviews,” official Google blog, August 15, 2024, https://blog.google/products/search/new-ways-to-connect-to-the-web-with-ai-overviews/. Accessed September 14, 2026. Expansion of AI Overviews to the United Kingdom, India, Japan, Indonesia, Mexico, and Brazil, with local language support in each country; the original separates those two passages with a dash, so this page uses indirect speech. Passage: “We’ll be rolling this expansion out gradually over the course of several weeks”. The Brazilian edition on Google’s Brazil blog, “Novas formas de se conectar com a web com as Visões Gerais criadas por IA” (New ways to connect with the web with AI Overviews), same date, https://blog.google/intl/pt-br/produtos/explore-e-encontre-respostas/novas-formas-de-se-conectar-com-a-web-com-as-visoes-gerais-criadas-por-ia/, accessed September 14, 2026, carries the same six countries and the same gradual rollout.
Srinivasan Venkatachary, “AI Overviews in Google Search expanding to more than 100 countries,” official Google blog, October 28, 2024, https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/search/ai-overviews-search-october-2024/. Accessed September 14, 2026. Passages: “AI Overviews will begin rolling out in more than 100 countries and territories”; “you can now get them in any of the currently supported languages, including English, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish”; and “ads in AI Overviews are now available on relevant queries for mobile users in the U.S.”
Hema Budaraju, “AI Overviews are now available in over 200 countries and territories, and more than 40 languages,” official Google blog, May 20, 2025, https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/search/ai-overview-expansion-may-2025-update/. Accessed September 14, 2026. Passage: “AI Overviews are now available in more than 200 countries and territories and in more than 40 languages”.
Hema Budaraju, “AI Mode in Google Search expands to more languages,” official Google blog, September 8, 2025, https://blog.google/products/search/ai-mode-expands-more-languages/. Accessed September 14, 2026. Among the five new languages for AI Mode, “Brazilian Portuguese”.
Search Console Help, “Generative AI performance report (Search),” https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/16984139?hl=en. Accessed September 14, 2026. Passages: “As of August 31, 2026, we’ve rolled out these insights to all websites worldwide.”; features included, AI Overviews and AI Mode; “Impressions are how many times links to your site were shown to a user in a generative AI feature on Google Search.” Dimensions described: pages, countries, dates, and devices. The page does not mention clicks or list the query as a dimension. Reasons for not seeing the report: not enough impressions in these features, or the site excluded in the control.
Search Console Help, “Search generative AI control,” https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/16908024?hl=en. Accessed September 14, 2026. Control rolled out to all sites on August 31, 2026, with inclusion as the default. Passages: “You won’t receive any traffic or impressions from these features.”; “Content from other sites will still be available in those features, and it may appear similar to yours.”; “this control isn’t used as a ranking or inclusion signal affecting other parts of Search.”; “This control doesn’t affect AI training; to limit training of the models used to generate responses in Search generative AI features, use Google-Extended. To block your content from appearing in Google Search completely, use noindex.”; and “it generally takes a few days” for the exclusion to take effect.
Search Console Help, “What are impressions, position, and clicks?” https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7042828?hl=en. Accessed September 14, 2026. Passages: “Clicking a link to an external page in the AI Overview counts as a click.” and “An AI Overview occupies a single position in search results, and all links in the AI Overview are assigned that same position.”
Google Analytics Help, “[GA4] Default channel group,” https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9756891?hl=en. Accessed September 14, 2026. Passages: “Organic Search is the channel by which users arrive at your site/app via non-ad links in organic-search results, including Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode.” and, on the AI Assistant channel, “It excludes Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode.” In the Portuguese version, the channels are called Pesquisa orgânica and Assistente de IA, and the page carries a notice of AI translation.
Google Search Central, “Robots meta tag, data-nosnippet, and X-Robots-Tag specifications,” https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/robots-meta-tag, page last updated March 24, 2026. Accessed September 14, 2026. The nosnippet rule applies to “web search, Google Images, Discover, AI Overviews, AI Mode” and “will also prevent the content from being used as a direct input for AI Overviews and AI Mode”. The max-snippet rule applies to “Google web search, Google Images, Discover, Assistant, AI Overviews, AI Mode”, “will also limit how much of the content may be used as a direct input” for those two features, and does not apply when the publisher has provided “in-page structured data or has a license agreement with Google”. The data-nosnippet attribute marks parts of the text “not to be used as a snippet”.
Ryan Law, with Xibeijia Guan, “Update: AI Overviews Reduce Clicks by 58%,” Ahrefs, February 4, 2026, modified August 27, 2026, https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overviews-reduce-clicks-update/. Accessed September 14, 2026. Method: 300,000 keywords from Keywords Explorer, 150,000 with an AI Overview and 150,000 informational ones without; average desktop click-through rate from “aggregated Google Search Console data”; December 2023 against December 2025. Passages: “the presence of an AI Overview now correlates with a 58% lower average clickthrough rate for the top-ranking page” and “it seems likely that the impact of AI Overviews has worsened.” The post does not state the country of the sample.
Ryan Law, “AI Overviews Reduce Clicks by 34.5%,” Ahrefs, April 17, 2025, modified June 5, 2026, https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overviews-reduce-clicks/. Accessed September 14, 2026. Same sample design, March 2024 against March 2025. Passage: “correlated with a 34.5% lower average clickthrough rate (CTR) for the top-ranking page”. It uses the U.S. launch as its date marker and does not state the country of the sample. The two editions have different windows, one year and two years, which is why this page does not read them as a series.

AI Overviews: What Google's AI Summary Is, When It Arrived, Where Ads Show Up, and How to Measure It