AI Overviews are the AI-written answers Google now places at the very top of its search results, above the usual list of links, put together from websites it has read. You have likely seen one: a few sentences that reply to your question directly, before any link.
This matters because it moves the most valuable spot on the page. Roughly 1 in 5 Google searches already shows an AI summary above the results (Pew Research, 2025), and about 46% of people now read that answer instead of clicking through (Bain and Company, 2026). Fewer people reach the links below, so being inside the answer matters more than it used to.
This is one flavor of the wider shift to AI search, and it feeds zero-click search, where the visit ends on the results page. Google builds the overview from pages it can read and trust, which comes back to the same groundwork as ordinary SEO: clear writing, structured facts, and speed.
I build sites so Google can read them cleanly and describe you correctly. Google can only summarize a business from a page it can parse. Read the full picture in The Art of Being Found.