What Google’s AI Overview says about you

The one your customers see without asking for it, sitting above the search results they actually came for.

We read: Live SERP · checked 2026-08

How people actually use Google AI Overviews

They do not, in the sense that nobody opens it. They run an ordinary Google search, and it is already there, above the ten blue links, answering the question they were about to click through to find the answer to.
It is frequently not shown at all. Google decides per search, and for a great many buying questions it shows nothing. That is a fact about the search result, not a gap in the scan, and it is reported as one.
When it is shown, it takes the visit that used to be yours. Somebody who would have landed on your services page reads three sentences instead, and then either rings the business named in them or rings nobody.

Where its answers come from

Google AI Overviews · Live SERP

This is the one we do not read through an API, because there is no API to read. We capture the live search result, the page a real person in a real place is served, and read the AI Overview out of it. That is a stronger claim than we make about the other four, and it is deliberately strongest here, because this is the surface where the distance between “what the API returns” and “what a customer actually sees” would matter most.

This is stated on every result you get, not only here. See how the score is calculated.

What we measure, and what counts as good

Every answer Google AI Overviews gives is graded on the same four-step scale as every other engine, so your columns are comparable. The scale is ordinal and every step carries a word and a mark as well as a shade — nothing here is colour alone.

AbsentYou are not in the answer at all
NamedMentioned, one of several
RecommendedAI tells them to choose you
CitedYour site is the source it quotes
Predates your last change

What to expect on Google AI Overviews

No answer is a real result on this engine, and we draw it as one. When Google shows no AI Overview for your question, that cell gets an empty dotted track and the words no answer, never a bar of length zero. A zero would say you scored nothing; the truth is that nothing was scored, and those are different facts. Cells like that are left out of your score entirely, and you are not charged for them.

What moves this engine

In the order worth doing them. These are checks from the scan itself, not general advice. Each one is graded on your site and each one comes with the change written out.

1Let AI systems read your websiteIf ChatGPT and Perplexity cannot fetch your pages when someone asks about you, nothing else on this list matters.about 2 minutes
2Help AI understand your servicesStructured data is the most reliable way to state facts about your business that a model will not misread.about 30 minutes
3Answer more of the questions customers askAnswer-first content is what gets quoted. Prose that buries the answer in paragraph four does not.about 45 minutes
4Help AI find every page on your siteOrdinary crawlability. Still necessary, still not a differentiator.about 30 minutes

15 checks run on your website in total, and the scan reports every one of them. These are the ones that matter most for this engine.

What we will not tell you

What share of your customers use Google AI Overviews. Nobody can measure that for your business, ourselves included, and a percentage invented to sound authoritative is worse than no number at all. Your scorecard shows each engine separately so you can weigh them against what you know about your own buyers.
That we can guarantee an answer changes. We can tell you what it says today, what the engines cite instead of you, and which specific things about your site are stopping them. Then we re-scan and show you the before and the after. Anyone promising a position is selling you something they do not control.
That a single scan settles it. These answers move. One reading is a snapshot, which is why the licence includes a re-scan and why monitoring exists as something you can add rather than something we pretend one scan already is.

Common questions

Half my questions came back with no answer. Did the scan fail?

No, that is the finding. Google does not show an AI Overview for every search, and for some trades it shows one rarely. Those cells are marked no answer, excluded from your score, and not charged. A tool that turned them into zeroes would be telling you that you performed badly on a question that was never asked.

Can I stop my site being used in an AI Overview?

Partly, and it is a real trade rather than a setting. Google reads your site for this using the same access it uses for ordinary search, so blocking it tends to cost you the search results as well. The scan reports which crawlers you currently allow and which you block so the decision is yours and informed. It does not make it for you or assume you want to be everywhere.

It says something wrong about my business. What can I do?

Fix the source it read. These answers are assembled from pages, so a wrong price, a stale opening time or an old address usually traces back to a page (yours, a directory, or an out-of-date listing) that still says so. Your scorecard shows which sources were cited for each question, which is where to start. Nobody can edit the answer directly, and anyone offering to is selling you something they cannot deliver.

The other engines

The quickest way to find out is to look at your own result.

Scan my site free

Google AI Overviews is a trade mark of its owner. MentionMachine is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to it, and the mark drawn beside its name on this page is our own. What is described here about how Google AI Overviews behaves was last checked 2026-08; if something on this page is out of date or wrong, tell us and we will correct it.