Definition
AI Overviews are Google's AI-generated summaries shown above classic results for many queries, synthesizing information from multiple sources with links. They matter for GEO because they compress the results page: studies across 2024-2026 consistently measure lower click-through to organic links when an AI Overview is present. Appearing inside the Overview (as a cited source) recovers some of that lost visibility — which requires the same crawlability, structure and citability work as other answer engines. For measurement, separate two questions: how often Overviews appear for your target queries (trigger rate), and how often you are cited when they do (inclusion rate). Trigger rates shift with Google's rollouts and vary sharply by query type — informational queries trigger far more often than navigational ones — so a traffic drop should be diagnosed against both numbers before blaming content.