Optimizing Content for AI Overviews: 7 Best Practices 

First introduced back in May 2024, Google’s AI Overviews began appearing sparsely for mostly informational keywords. 

Fast-forward to March 5th, 2025, and they’ve received a major overhaul and will begin to appear more frequently for all types of queries. 

This raises an important question for marketers – how can you improve brand visibility with this new search feature?

Thus, optimizing for AI Overviews is now a major aspect of SEO, so it’s important to know what matters for boosting visibility and what doesn’t. 

Here’s what an AI Overview looks like for reference:

Notice that an AI Overview was generated for a commercial keyword with local intent, which was pretty rare before the Gemini 2.0 overhaul in March.

That means SEOs everywhere will have to take AI Overviews into account, even for local SEO strategies.

Also, each Overview consists of an AI-generated summary, various citations, and a source panel containing 3 relevant search results.

Getting your brand to appear in any one of these areas is now crucial for target audience exposure, traffic generation, and online visibility. But how can you increase the chances that your brand will appear in one of these sections?

That’s what we’re here to teach you today, so keep reading!

Why Content Needs to be AI-Friendly 

While generative AI (GAI) search is undoubtedly rising in popularity, it’s still a long way off from dethroning Google – as they still account for 89.74% of the search engine market. 

However, GAI search is gaining traction at an incredible rate. 

According to a new survey by Higher Visibility, 71.5% of respondents use AI tools for search, with 14% of them reporting daily use. While 79.8% of users still prefer Bing and Google for general searches, the fact remains that the majority of people are using AI tools to search the internet.

Moreover, users who still prefer Google will start seeing AI Overviews for most of their searches, and Bing has incorporated Copilot into its SERPs (search engine results pages), too: