How to check if your site appears in Google AI Overviews

What are AI Overviews?

AI Overviews are the AI-composed answers Google shows above the normal results — a paragraph or two synthesised from several sources, with the cited pages shown as link cards. They started life as the Search Generative Experience, went by SGE for a while, and have been live for UK searches since 2024. They appear when Google decides an AI answer serves the query better than ten blue links, which increasingly includes commercial questions — the "best payroll software for small business" kind, not just homework questions.

How do you check if you're cited?

There's no official report, so you look. The discipline mirrors the ChatGPT check:

1. Use your buyer questions, not your brand name. The same six queries a stranger with a budget would type.
2. Search signed out, in a private window, from a UK location. Signed-in results are personalised and will lie to you about what strangers see.
3. Note whether an Overview appears at all for each query. No Overview means nothing to win or lose there today.
4. Expand the Overview and open the citation cards. The sources aren't always visible until you click through the panel — check whether your domain is among them, and note which pages of yours (if any) get cited.
5. Repeat monthly. Overview presence is volatile: the same query can gain, lose or reshuffle its Overview between weeks.

Why doesn't Search Console show this?

Search Console folds AI Overview impressions and clicks into the ordinary Performance report — a citation in an Overview counts as an impression like any other, with no label to separate it. If your impressions rise while clicks fall on a query, an Overview answering the question above your result is a common culprit, but GSC won't confirm it. Hence the manual check.

How do you get cited in an Overview?

Google composes Overviews from its normal index, so the entry ticket is the one you already know: be crawled, be indexed, rank respectably. The difference is what gets selected from the candidates. Overviews quote passages, not pages — a heading that states the question and a paragraph directly under it that answers in plain, complete sentences. Pages that make the reader assemble the answer from scattered paragraphs give the engine nothing to lift.

You don't need to outrank everyone to be cited. Overviews regularly pull from pages outside the top three — the most quotable passage wins, not the highest-ranked page.

Our free readiness audit scores exactly this for a single page: whether an AI engine could quote it, and what's blocking that.

Do AI Overviews steal your clicks?

Sometimes, and it's worth being honest about. When the Overview answers the whole question, some searchers stop there. But the choice isn't between an Overview existing or not — it exists either way. The choice is between being one of its cited sources or watching competitors be. Cited pages still receive clicks, and being named in the answer builds the brand recognition that later, higher-intent searches convert on.