Last week at Google I/O, Google referred that what everybody has been calling SGE as AI Overviews.
They also announced that they are rolling it out to everybody, but they did not mention a small detail and this detail is a very important thing to note for SEOs.
Previously, SGE / AIO results were only available for users that had Search Labs enabled.
As of last week, you no longer need to have Search Labs enabled to see AI Overviews, with a caveat: you DO need to be logged to a Google account in order to see these results, for the most part.
This week, we decided to run a test on 230,000 keywords (without being logged in, in our standard scraping network) to see if any AI Overview results were coming back.
Out of this 230,000 keyword set, only 47 SERPs returned with AI Overviews.
Here is one example of an AI Overview found “in the wild” (not logged in) via our SERP monitoring:
This is a test we are going to continue to run, but it does explain the very small percentages reported by Semrush Sensor and other tools that claim to “track SGE / AIO now.”
We don’t fault any other vendors for marketing their capabilities, but we do believe that transparency is very important on this topic as SEO teams are trying to understand the impact.
How to get and measure AI Overview data
As of today, the only way to get AI Overview results in SERP data, as far as we are aware, is to be logged in.
At the same time, personalization must be considered since data objectivity is also a critical point for a monitoring vendor.
We are considering strategies to provide valuable insights to our customers, keeping these issues in mind.
There will likely be more topics related to AI Overviews in the future, but there may be promotional claims by tool vendors and users’ exaggerated interpretations. As mentioned earlier, the claims of “obtaining AI Overview data” are likely based on two methods:
- Using a very small dataset
- Fetching with a large number of logged in users, resulting in more significantly overhead and operational costs
We are not aware of any vendors in our industry currently doing this on a large scale.
We have seen some vendors make exaggerated announcements, but upon closer inspection, they do not seem to have achieved this.
※ We are not talking about SEMRush here. They detect a very small number without logging in, which is consistent with our experimental results.
This is the current state of AI Overviews measurement. A very small sample of less than 0.1% can be obtained, but it’s a rare case.
Finally, we hope these changes will be an opportunity for many SEO professionals.
AI Overviews present new challenges and opportunities for SEO and marketing teams. From our long experience, we can say that teams that can quickly adapt to such changes will achieve remarkable results.
We are committed to providing these insights to our customers as quickly as possible while maintaining 100% transparency regarding data sources.