Definition. A summarised answer generated by a language model that Google shows above the classic search results. Sources appear as small references, but the main content is synthetic text. Bing Copilot, Perplexity and other providers offer comparable formats.

Why it matters. AI Overviews shift clicks and attention. Content that is not written to be quoted directly is picked up as a source less often, and the visitor never reaches the page.

Related. AI Search, Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), AI Retrieval