How do we optimize for broken AI Overviews?

What do we do about AI overviews? What are they supposed to do?

Google says it's doing the Googling for you.

Rather than you searching, reading, and forming a conclusion in your mind or maybe citing things from sources in some bit of writing you’re doing, Google is creating a basic summary of information on a topic.

But how is Google doing that? How do these summaries get written? Where are the sources coming from and how?

If we know how this system works and how it cites sources, maybe we can hope to be one of those sources and get some traffic to our site.

Thanks to folks like Cyrus Sheperd and Lily Ray, we have a little more insight into how AI Overviews work—or don't work—which helps us determine a good SEO strategy going forward.

Sources:

Cyrus Sheperd get AI Overview Citation: https://x.com/CyrusShepard/status/179...

Lily Ray on Linked:   / lily-ray-44755615_seo-aio-aioverviews-ugcp...  

Sundar Pichai interview with The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/24158374/goo...

Wired on Google cutting back AI Overviews: https://www.wired.com/story/google-cu...

ABC News on Overviews: https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/goo...

Liz Reid's statement: https://blog.google/products/search/a...

Perplexity results cited as AI Overview sources: https://searchengineland.com/perplexi...

Ryan Jones on Twitter: https://x.com/RyanJones/status/179803...

Perplexity Laughs at Google: https://ca.news.yahoo.com/googles-ai-...

Google Search Leak: https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/31/24...

Google Market Share Drop: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/g...

Google case study on crawling and structured data: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/g...