AI Overviews: what they are, where the answers come from, and what changes for a brand

AI Overviews are Google’s AI answers at the top of the results: live in Italy since March 2025, more than 2.5 billion monthly users. Across 450 automotive questions asked in Italian they use 5 sources per answer, drawn first from Facebook and YouTube, then from Sky, Gazzetta, and government sites. What changes for anyone who wants to be in them.

Anyone who googles “which hybrid SUV uses the least fuel” now finds, before the ten links, a few lines of text written by AI: that is the AI Overview. People read it, often stop there, and open the links less. For a brand, the old question changes: being on the first page is no longer enough, what matters is what that summary says and which pages Google took it from.

Here we explain what AI Overviews are, how they build the answer, and we bring our own data: across 450 automotive questions asked in Italian, which sites Google actually cites.

What AI Overviews are and where they show up

An AI Overview is the AI-generated answer Google places at the top of the results page, with links to the pages it was drawn from. It arrived in the United States in May 2024; at the end of October 2024 Google extended it to more than 100 countries, reporting over a billion monthly users. In Italy it has been available since March 26, 2025, for adults searching while signed in to their Google account.

On June 3, 2026, Google updated the numbers: more than 2.5 billion monthly active users for AI Overviews and over one billion for AI Mode. AI Mode is the newer piece: a separate Search tab for long, complex questions, available in Italian since October 8, 2025. Google writes that there people ask questions “two or three times longer” than in a classic search.

One detail matters: the AI Overview does not always appear. In its documentation for site owners, Google writes that it is shown “only when our systems determine that it adds value over a classic search” and that it is therefore “often not triggered.” In the Pew Research study, on searches made in the United States in March 2025, the summary appeared in 18% of cases.

Where the answers come from

Google described the mechanism in its documentation for site owners. When a question comes in, the system may use query fan-out: it sends several related searches in parallel, across subtopics and data sources, and builds the answer from the pages it finds. The models then choose the supporting pages, and Google says it shows “a broader and more diverse set” of them than a normal search.

To be one of those pages, no new requirements apply. The page has to be indexed, eligible to appear with a snippet, and compliant with Search policies. Google is explicit: “You don’t need to create new machine-readable files, text files or AI markup,” nor special structured data. It is the same principle that applies to the llms.txt file, which Google’s and the AI companies’ bots barely read.

What changes is the work upstream: the pages that make it into the answers are the ones that answer a precise question clearly, with the facts expressed as text. That is the part of the work we call GEO, which acts on sources, structure, and the clarity of information so that models understand and cite a brand.

Who actually gets cited: 450 automotive questions

To see where the answers come from, we used data from the online motoring daily we run. Over the last thirty days, the monitoring platform connected to Quotidiano Motori asked 450 automotive questions, in Italian, to Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity, and recorded answers and sources.

The first figure is the number of sources: AI Overviews use an average of 5 sources per answer; Perplexity 12; ChatGPT 26. An AI Overview is a short answer resting on a few pages, so getting into those five counts more than appearing among ChatGPT’s twenty-six.

The second figure is which sites. Across the 450 AI Overview answers, the most used domains are Facebook, present in 42% of answers, and YouTube, in 41%. Then come Sky at 19%, Gazzetta at 16%, government sites such as ENAC and the Ministry of Transport at 16%, three trade publications between 7% and 12%, and Instagram at 9%. Quotidiano Motori appears in 7.6% of answers, fourteenth out of 258 domains.

The reading is simple: on everyday questions, the AI Overview draws from where people discuss and show things, that is social and video, and from official sources for regulatory data. Publications count, but they come later. For a brand, it means your page competes with a YouTube video and a Facebook group, not only with your competitor’s site. We had seen the same pattern, with different numbers, in the sources models cite when they describe a brand.

What happens to clicks

The Pew Research Center measured the behavior of 900 American adults in March 2025: when an AI summary was among the results, people clicked a result in 8% of visits, against 15% without a summary. Links inside the summary were clicked in 1% of cases. And 26% left Google right after, against 16%.

In Italy, according to SparkToro, 63.4% of Google searches end without a click, a June 2026 figure covering all searches, with or without AI. Google answers on a different level: in its documentation it writes that clicks coming from result pages with AI Overviews are “higher quality,” because visitors stay longer on the site. The two things go together: fewer visits, but more targeted ones.

One last element: advertising. Ads inside AI Overviews exist only in English in twelve countries, Italy excluded; above and below the answer they appear everywhere. The full picture, with ChatGPT Ads and the AI Mode formats, is in the analysis of how advertising is entering AI answers.

What changes for a brand

Three things. First: the answer is the new first position. If the question concerns your category and your page is not among the five sources, the person reads a description of the market you are not in, and in 92% of cases opens no link at all.

Second: the controls exist, but they are coarse. Google lets you limit what it shows with nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet, and noindex, and with Google-Extended for the training of other systems. Opting out of AI Overviews, however, today means opting out of classic results too. The separate Search Console toggle has been in testing in the UK since June 2026, and sites that use it “will not receive traffic or impressions” from AI features.

Third: measuring is still manual work. In Search Console, AI Overviews sit inside the “Web” search type, with no separate line; the new per-page and per-country data are also in testing in the UK. Until they arrive, the only way to know what the answer says about your brand is to ask the questions, record the answers and sources, and repeat over time. That is what we do with the AI Brand Audit, across six platforms, AI Overviews included.

Frequently asked questions

Written by

Caterina Di Iorgi

Co-founder of ThinkAI, an AI Brand Governance boutique that measures brands' AI visibility on ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. A journalist and philosophy graduate of Sapienza University of Rome, she founded GlobeStyles and heads Lifestyle at Quotidiano Motori.