What Is Google AI Overviews? Key Features And How To Access It?

Google, during its I/O event, expanded AI overviews to everyone and added new-gen AI experiences to take more of the legwork out of searching. The AI Overviews were previously known as the Search Generative Experience, or SGE, to users in the US and soon around the world. 

Read this article to know more about Google AI overviews, features, and steps to access it. 

What is the Google AI Overview?

Google AI Overviews were introduced as part of the Search Generative Experience in May 2023. It was opt-in within the Google Search Labs until Google began testing AI Overviews in the wild for a subset of users in March 2024.

This feature is meant to give you a general sense of the answer to your query along with links to resources for more information. It provides a few snippets of an answer based on its understanding of queries and the content it found on the topic across the web.

Gemini 1.5 Pro: Key Features, Price & How To Use This Next-Generation Model

What are the features of the Google AI Overview?

• AI Overviews put together all the information you need, and the search will do the work for you.
• With AI overviews, people are visiting a greater diversity of websites for help with more complex questions. Also, the links included in AI overviews get more clicks than if the page had appeared as a traditional web listing for that query.
• Users can adjust the AI Overview with options to simplify the language or break it down in more detail. This can be particularly useful if you’re new to a topic, or if you’re trying to simplify something to satisfy your kid’s curiosity.
• With the custom Gemini model’s multi-step reasoning capabilities, this feature will help with increasingly complex questions.
• Beyond finding the right answer or information for a complex question, Google AI Overview (Search) will also be able to plan with you. With planning capabilities directly in Search, you can get help creating plans for whatever you need, starting with meals and vacations.
• Google AI Overviews will use generative AI to brainstorm with you and create an AI-organized results page that makes it easy to explore.
• Search is so much more than just words in a text box. With advancements in video understanding, Google AI Overviews will be able to take visual search to a whole new level, with the ability to ask questions with video.
• Searching with video saves you the time and trouble of finding the right words to describe this issue, and you’ll get an AI overview with steps and resources to troubleshoot.

However, you won’t see AI Overviews for all your searches. AI Overviews are reserved for answering more complex questions where Google feels they can add value beyond the search results. Also, if AI Overview doesn’t add value to what Google Search shows by default, Google will not show an AI Overview.

What is Gemini 1.5? All you need to know

How to access the Google AI Overview?

AI Overviews and more” is an experiment in Search Labs that lets you see AI Overviews on more Google searches and offers access to additional generative AI features in Search. 

You’ll see the Search Labs icon next to AI Overviews when you’ve opted into the “AI Overviews and more” experiment in Search Labs on your computer, Android, iPhone, & iPad. 

AI overviews will begin rolling out to everyone in the U.S., with more countries coming soon. That means that this week, hundreds of millions of users will have access to AI overviews, and we expect to bring them to over a billion people by the end of the year. 

How to Use Gemini AI in Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Gmail, and Drive?