The Hidden Ecommerce Opportunity in Google's AI Overviews

Ishara Fernando

19 Dec 2025 — 6 min read

Google AI Overviews (AIOs) are changing how people find products online. Instead of showing just a list of links, Google now shows AI-generated summaries at the top of search results.

For online stores, this matters: If your product pages don't have clear details and good structure, Google won't show your products in these AI summaries—even if you rank well normally. This means fewer people will find your products.

This article explains what AI Overviews are, how they work, and how to optimize your ecommerce store to appear in them.

1.What Are Google AI Overviews for Ecommerce?

AI Overviews are short AI-written summaries that appear at the very top of Google search results. They answer questions quickly without making people click through multiple websites.

For online stores, this means shopping searches like "best running shoes for flat feet" or "wireless earbuds with long battery" now show AI summaries with product recommendations first.

Why sitemaps matter: Google uses your website's sitemap to find and organize your product pages. If your sitemap isn't clean and updated, Google might miss important products, which means they won't appear in AI Overviews.

History and Evolution

May 2023: Launched as "Search Generative Experience" (SGE)
May 2024: Renamed "AI Overviews" and available to everyone in the US
August 2024: Expanded to UK, India, Japan, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia
By 2025: Available in 120+ countries

Why Google made this: To compete with ChatGPT and make product discovery faster for shoppers.

Components of AI Overviews

A typical AI Overview includes:

AI-Generated Summary: A concise, multi-paragraph overview, often expandable, summarizing key information.
Key Points: Bulleted or numbered lists highlighting main ideas, each linked to a cited website.
Source Citations: Prominent links to authoritative sources, with inline links added within summaries as of October 2024.
Adjustable Complexity: Users can toggle between simplified and detailed summary options to match their needs.

2.How Do AI Overviews Work?

Google's AI reads your product pages, understands the content, and pulls out helpful information to create summaries.

The Process

Understanding the Search: AI figures out what the shopper wants (specs, comparisons, solutions)
Finding Information: Scans top-ranking pages for product details and reviews
Creating the Summary: Writes a summary combining info from multiple sources
Adding Links: Includes links to the best sources (usually from top 10 search results)

For product searches, the AI looks for:

Clear specifications
Customer reviews
Use cases and examples
Comparison data

When Do AI Overviews Appear?

AI Overviews show up for:

How-to questions: "how to choose the right mattress"
Product comparisons: "iPhone 15 vs Samsung S24"
Complex searches: "best gaming laptop under $1000 for students"
Research queries: "best cushioned running shoes for knee pain"

They DON'T usually show for:

Simple brand searches: "Nike Air Max 270"
Navigational searches
Very short searches

If you're interested in Answer Engine Optimization, you can find our article on AEO (Answer Engine Optimization).

Comparison with AI Mode (SGE)

AI Overviews differ from Google's experimental AI Mode (evolved from SGE):

Feature	AI Overviews	AI Mode/SGE
Follow-up Questions	Static, one-time summaries.	Supports conversational, context-aware follow-ups.
Multimodality	Text-only responses.	Handles text,voice and image inputs.
Complexity	Quick,summarized answers.	Advanced reasoning for exploratory or complex tasks

3.What are the Challenges and Criticisms in Google AI Overviews

While AIOs offer significant user benefits, they have faced scrutiny for accuracy issues, traffic impacts, and ethical concerns.

Why E-commerce Sites Often Fail in AIO

For e-commerce stores, the biggest challenge is not content accuracy but data clarity. Google’s AI systems prefer clean, structured product information — ingredients, materials, use cases, variants, and tech specs. If these details are missing or unstructured, AIOs may not cite your pages even when they rank well organically

Accuracy and "Hallucinations"

AIOs have occasionally produced misleading or harmful suggestions, such as recommending eating rocks or applying glue to pizza, often due to misinterpreting satirical content or encountering "data voids" (queries with limited high-quality sources). Google has responded by:

Enhancing detection of satirical or unreliable user-generated content.
Refining algorithms to prioritize authoritative sources.
Implementing safety guardrails, such as SafeSearch, to filter harmful or explicit content.

Impact on Publishers

AIOs have significantly reduced organic traffic, with studies showing a 34.5% overall click reduction and an average 24.37% drop in organic clicks, with some sites losing over 40%. This has led to legal challenges:

Chegg vs. Alphabet (February 2025): Chegg claimed AIOs violated antitrust laws by aggregating content into "low-quality, unverified AI summaries."

Penske Media Corporation vs. Google (September 2025): The publisher of Rolling Stone alleged AIOs illegally repurposed content, reducing site traffic.

4. How to Optimize for AI Overviews | Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)

To adapt to AIOs, content creators must shift from traditional SEO to Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), focusing on being cited or mentioned in AI-generated responses.

This shift has led to the development of specialized platforms like ANSWEE that help e-commerce businesses optimize their product visibility across multiple AI answer engines including ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google Gemini, providing dedicated tools and analytics for this new optimization landscape.

Content Strategy for GEO

AI-Favored Attribute	Traditional SEO Goal	GEO Approach
Documented Expertise	Broad topic coverage	Proprietary methods, exclusive data, in-depth analysis
Quantified Data & Citations	General facts	Explicit source citations, quantified claims (e.g., study data)
Clear Structure	Narrative flow	Subheadings, lists, autonomous sections
Long-Form Depth	Short, punchy content	Comprehensive, research-heavy content (up to 28 sources cited)
Multi-Platform Optimization	Single search engine focus	Cross-platform visibility using tools like ANSWEE to systematically submit to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity with performance tracking

Technical Optimization Tips

Structure: Use bullet points, clear subheadings, and schema markup (e.g., HowTo or FAQ schema) for AI digestibility.
Intent Matching: Target long-tail, conversational queries that align with user intent.
Brand Mentions: For commercial queries, optimize bottom-of-funnel pages with detailed product specifics to secure mentions rather than just citations.

Soft SEO+GEO Transition

Traditional SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is designed for ranking.
Your goal is to appear as high as possible on the results page when a user types a keyword into Google. Search engines match keywords, backlinks, and page authority to decide which links to show first.

But in Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), the objective is completely different.

AI systems like Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity do not simply list links. Instead, they:

Read your page
Understand your content
Extract the most helpful parts
Summarize the information in their own words
Cite you only if your content is clear, structured, and authoritative

Advanced practitioners are also utilizing specialized AI answer engine optimization platforms like ANSWEE that can systematically submit products to multiple AI engines, track performance across platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity, and provide real-time analytics on AI answer engine visibility—capabilities specifically designed for the GEO era.

Traditional SEO vs GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)

A quick comparison showing how classic search optimization differs from making content machine-readable for AI Overviews and answer engines.

Traditional SEO	GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
Get ranked in the top 3 search results	Get selected by AI as a source
Focus on keywords, backlinks, metadata	Focus on clarity, structure, and machine readability
Humans read your page	AI systems read, understand, and summarize your page
Your link appears only if a user clicks	Your content appears inside the AI answer

5. Frequently Asked Questions about Google AI Overviews

AI Overviews were initially called the Search Generative Experience (SGE), introduced experimentally in May 2023.

AIOs use a customized Gemini model integrated with Google's search infrastructure and Knowledge Graph, employing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for fresh, web-based answers.

No, AIOs appear selectively for informational, complex, or long-tail queries where they add value, and are less likely for navigational, branded, or sensitive searches.

AIOs reduce organic clicks by 34.5% on average, with some sites experiencing over 40% traffic loss, as users find answers directly on the SERP.

Users cannot disable AIOs, as they are a core search feature. Workarounds include using browser extensions or Google's "Web" filter.

To increase citation likelihood, create comprehensive, structured content (using lists and subheadings), target long-tail queries, include documented expertise, and maintain a strong SEO foundation, as 70% of citations come from top 10 organic results.

Yes, dedicated platforms like ANSWEE have emerged to address the unique challenges of AI answer engine optimization. These tools focus on submitting products and content to multiple AI platforms (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google Gemini, etc.), tracking visibility across different AI engines, and providing analytics specific to AI answer engine performance-capabilities that traditional SEO tools weren't designed to handle.