Google Updates AI Overviews With More Prominent Links, Expanded Availability

Google has made some updates to AI Overviews, displaying relevant links more prominently and expanding the feature to six more countries.

These changes will make it easier for users to discover content from publishers, businesses and creators, the company said in a Thursday (Aug. 15) blog post.

AI Overviews — which was launched in the United States in May and provides an artificial intelligence (AI)-generated summary of information from several sources along with search results — now includes a new link display that provides users with another way to find relevant websites while they search, according to the post.

This is offered in the form of a right-hand link display for AI Overviews on desktop and site icons on mobile, the post said.

Google is also testing the addition of links directly within the text of AI Overviews, per the post.

“With AI Overviews, we’re seeing that people have been visiting a greater diversity of websites for help with more complex questions,” Hema Budaraju, senior director of product management, search at Google, said in the post. “And when people click from search result pages with AI Overviews, these clicks are higher quality for websites — meaning users are more likely to spend more time on the sites they visit.”

It was reported in May that publishers and content creators who rely on search engine traffic for revenue were concerned that AI Overviews could adversely affect the ecosystem of online content creation and dissemination.

Danielle Coffey, president and CEO of the News/Media Alliance, a nonprofit representing more than 2,200 publishers, said at the time that the introduction of AI-generated summaries could significantly diminish the amount of traffic going to publishers’ websites.

The rollout of AI Overviews also sent shockwaves through the eCommerce industry, prompting online retailers to reevaluate their search engine visibility strategies.

Within weeks of its launch of AI Overviews, Google found that the feature was generating some “odd results” and made more than a dozen technical improvements to solve those problems, the company said in a May 30 blog post.

Google also announced in the Thursday blog post that it will expand the availability of AI Overviews to six more countries — the United Kingdom, India, Japan, Indonesia, Mexico and Brazil — with local language support.

“We’ll be rolling this expansion out gradually over the course of several weeks, with a focus on maintaining Search’s high bar for information quality,” Budaraju said in the post. “Through our testing in these markets, we’ve found that people prefer using Search with AI Overviews, and they find their search results more helpful.”