The AI industry was quite dull and boring. Things changed dramatically since Large Language Models power generative AI tools become the overhyped trend.
Since OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, tech companies began an arms race, where they compete to develop and provide increasingly powerful AI. And Google as one of the biggest and most powerful, is expecting generative AI to be part of a post-search engine future.
With AI Overviews, the company is blending generative AI with its search engine.
But when it was first launched, people were quick to realize that it may source its knowledge from shady websites and from sources with unreliable track record.
As a result, the AI may blurt out dangerous and wrong answers.
This time, Google is giving it a massive update.
AI Overviews, once called Search Generative Experience (SGE), uses a special version of Google’s Gemini AI to generate answers at the top of search results.
What it does, is pulling information from different websites and combines it into a short, easy-to-read overview.
In a LinkedIn post, a user suggested that Google AI Overviews seem to get impacted by Google Core Updates, and asked Google's liaison and Google's Search team John Mueller to clarify.
Responding to the post, Mueller confirmed about the change.
"These are a part of search, and core updates affect search, so yes," he said.
So what happens here is that, Google should massively improvements the answers AI Overviews can give while responding to users' questions.
Sources cited in Google AI Overviews that the feature matches one or more of the webpages from the top 10 Google organic search results 99.5% of the time.
What this means here, Google is able to incorporate more traditional search ranking signals as part of its custom Gemini model.
Google released Core Updates as part of a broader changes to its overall Google Search's algorithms.
These updates are intended to improve the quality of search results by reassessing how content is evaluated and ranked.
Typically, the updates are rolled out several times per year.
As Google keeps integrating AI into search, the company knows that it needs to make quite a lot of adjustments and tweaks to its existing algorithms, to better provide signals the AI needs to understand.
The change means that the landscape of search engine optimization (SEO) isn't changing too dramatically, because according to experts, AI Overview optimization is now just Google optimization.
The bottom line here is that, the best way to get cited by AI Overviews is to just rank high in Google.