Research: Sources of Google AI Overviews

New research published by SEO platform vendor SE Ranking finds that authoritative, trusted, long-established domains predominate as sources for Google's AI Overviews.

SE Ranking suggests that we use the results of their research to come up with ways to optimize our content better and maintain visibility in search results.

Some key findings:

• Only 7.47% of Google searches triggered AI Overviews (AIOs) during the SE Ranking study.
• Average AIO length was 2,633 characters, 397 words - down 40% from a few months ago.
• "Prompt-type" queries with a search volume less than 50/month and CPC under $0.50 were most likely to trigger AIOs.
• AIOs linked to at least one domain in the top 10 organic results 93.67% of the time.
• Industries with the highest numbers of links matching the top 30 search results were:
  • Relationships 40.64%
  • Food & Beverage 23.58%
  • Business 18.48%
• The 3 industries with the highest incidence of keywords with commercial intent - Fashion and Beauty, Ecommerce and Retail - saw significant declines in the triggering of AIOs. (SE Ranking says this result merits further study.)
• 20% of AIOs referenced a government source, and more than 25% referenced educational/academic resources.
• Almost 10% of keywords triggered AIOs linking to domains registered in India (.in).
• Industries triggering less than 1% of AIOs included Legal, Healthcare, Career & Jobs, News & Politics, Cars and Real Estate.
• Travel industry also had a low AIO rate: 1.32%.
• AIOs and Featured Snippets appeared together 63.67% of the time.
• Long-tail queries:
  • 32.02% of 10-word queries triggered AIOs.
  • Low-volume keywords (0-50/month) triggered AIOs 38.06% of the time.
  • Low-CPC keywords ($0 to $0.50) produced AIOs 60.67% of the time.
• Websites most linked from AIOs (top 5):
  1. YouTube
  2. Linkedin
  3. Heatlthline.com
  4. Verywellmind.com
  5. Forbes.com

The 20 websites most linked from AIOs have these characteristics:

• 24K to 24M referring domains and 247K to 38.5B backlinks
• 531K to 1.07B organic keywords
• 213K to 8.14B organic visitors
• Created between 1985 and 2017, average age 25 years

Go here to see distribution of AIO sources by industry:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ubfTXj_zu0OL6qYRaGyWh1sERH-MdCOyGMK1rQo_W88/edit?usp=sharing

SE Ranking analysts infer from these results that:

• Google is prioritizing quality over quantity in AIOs.
• Shorter AIO content suggests that Google wants to be more to-the-point with its AI answers.
• Google appears to value unique, relevant content that may not rank highly for a query because of competition or other factors; also content that ranks for other keywords related to the query.
• Because long-tail queries with low volume and low CPC trigger featured snippets and AIOs, it's crucial to aim for visibility in featured snippets and AIOs as well as broaden keyword research to include detailed, specific queries that are less competitive and highly relevant.
• To maintain a good CTR, websites should strive to be the primary source in organic results below the AIOs.
• We should also do whatever it takes to get featured in AIOs.

Parameters of the study:

Google searches were done on 11 July 2024 in English from NYC using Chrome running on Ubuntu with all personalization disabled.

SE Ranking is developing an AI Overviews Tracking Tool and you can join a waitlist for early access to it here:

https://seranking.com/ai-overviews-tracker.html

I'm assuming there's going to be a cost associated with this tool. But if that's true, I won't be sharing in the proceeds, and you shouldn't interpret my mention as a recommendation or a sales pitch. But it looks like SE Ranking has some smart people.