Terakeet Case Study: What Impacts Inclusion in AI Overviews?

Key Points

Our data science team did a deep dive into AI Overviews (AIO) to uncover insights about Google’s new search feature.
Higher-ranking articles are more likely to get pulled as sources into AIO results and displayed prominently above all other search results.
We also learned more about AIO content consistency over time and what affects the probability of a page being featured in AIO content.

When it comes to Google’s AI Overviews (AIO), there is scant information about what influences these AI-generated results, especially from official sources. There are articles and speculation, but not much data-driven research into AIO that answers basic questions.

For instance, are AIOs consistent over time or constantly changing? What impacts whether or not a page is included as a source for a given AIO? These are just a few unclear aspects of Google’s AI Overviews.

Members of our data science team set out to not only study AI Overviews, but to also develop a method of analyzing AIO content at scale, which we can use to monitor and discover trends in the AI search landscape. By the end of our exploration, we gained valuable insights and also discovered new areas of exploration.

Purpose: What did we aim to discover?

The goal of this research was to quantify basic AIO information and understand more about how AIO works and what impacts inclusion of specific URLs in its answers.

The substantial information gap presents a great opportunity for learning and also developing new tools and methodologies for our work with global brands.

To find out and to structure the study, we put forward three questions for investigation:

Does organic search ranking impact AIO inclusion?
Does basic HTML formatting impact AIO inclusion?
Will the AIOs be consistent in the URLs they include and provide similar answers week over week?

The Results: Search ranking impacts AIO inclusion

There’s much more to study beyond this preliminary exploration of AI Overviews, and the tool continues to evolve, but we came away with some interesting results:

Question	Result	Details
Does ranking impact AIO inclusion?	Yes	Higher-ranking pages are featured more often in AIOs.
Does HTML formatting impact a page’s AIO inclusion?	No	Basic HTML features do not impact whether a page is included in an AIO.
Is AIO content consistent week over week?	Yes	AIO content meaning is very similar week to week.
Are featured AIO URLs consistent week over week?	No	The set of URLs featured in AIOs show mixed consistency week to week.

Conclusion: The dynamic AI search environment

Google’s AI Overviews search feature is an evolving, ever-changing environment, but at this early stage there appears to be clear signals that determine if a given page gets included or not. It’s also clear that while AIO content tends to be very similar over time, the featured URLs are more volatile.

This demonstrates that brands should maintain SEO programs. Building content with the purpose of ranking in Google has the added benefit of boosting performance and inclusion potential in AI Overviews.

That being said, a purely AI-focused strategy like generative engine optimization (GEO) unlocks the analysis and insight needed to rapidly and fully address the AI space. It can also reach beyond AI Overviews.

Additionally, brand-owned content included in AI Overviews will likely receive more engagement due to its high visibility. For these reasons, GEO is a fundamental strategy for brand narrative and online reputation management.

Brand leaders need to consider the AI search space now and make strategic investments in the emerging, non-traditional ‘channel’ that attracts billions of eyes worldwide.

Methodology: How did we go about our research?

This study was conducted by members of Terakeet’s expert data science team, led by Senior Data Scientist Adi Srikanth. The data was collected from thousands of search results and AI Overviews.

Full case study available on our engineering blog — Unboxing and Understanding Google’s AI Overviews.
For more unique insight into AI search, see our next case study — How Are AI Overviews Impacting Organic Traffic?