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What is an AI Overview in Google search?
An AI Overview is the generated summary Google places above the normal results for some searches, written from pages it retrieves and shown with a small set of source links. It appears most often on informational questions and far less on searches with clear commercial or local intent.
Which searches trigger one
Explanatory questions trigger them constantly. Searches where somebody wants to buy, book, or call trigger them much less, because Google has an obvious commercial reason to keep those on ordinary results and ads. A trade business's money searches are therefore less exposed than a publisher's.
What it does to clicks
It reduces them on the questions it answers completely. A search whose answer is a single fact was never going to produce a customer anyway. The searches that hurt are the middle ground, where a reader would previously have clicked through and started forming an opinion about who to hire.
How to be one of the sources
The same discipline as everything else in this set. Answer the question in the first lines of the page. Keep each section self-contained. Be specific enough to be worth quoting. Being the source in an overview also carries a second benefit, since the pages that get selected there tend to be the ones assistants retrieve as well.
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