Google has announced the expansion of AI Overviews within Google Search to over 100 countries.
As part of the update, Google is extending language support across the board so you’ll be able to see the AI summaries in any of the currently supported languages.
“If you’re in any country with AI Overviews, you can now get them in any of the currently supported languages, including English, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish. So, for example, if you’re in the United States and you speak Spanish, you can now see AI Overviews in your preferred language.”
The expansion started rolling out this week, and Google says it will bring AI Overviews to over a billion users every month. You can see the full list of countries and territories here.
What does it mean for website traffic?
Google says it has introduced more prominent ways to show links to relevant websites since May. This follows criticism at the time of the launch that it would have a negative effect on traffic to websites.
The new ways links are displayed include a right-hand link display on desktop, site icons at the upper right on mobile, and - most recently - in-line links directly within the text of the Overviews, which were launched earlier this month.
Google says feedback on AI Overviews has been “highly positive” with people finding the search results more helpful.
It also says testing shows these updates drove an increase in traffic to supporting websites compared to the previous designs.
However, no supporting data is cited for these assertions.
SEO Lily Ray posted on X the results of a poll which asked the question:
"For those of you who have consistently seen AI Overviews on Google for months, do you find yourself clicking on organic results:"
- Less than before? - 50%
- More than before? - 13%
- Same as before? - 37%
There's currently no way to measure traffic from AI Overviews in Search Console, and Google has said there are no plans to add this feature.
Hopefully Google will reconsider its position; it does raise the question of why they are not providing this data. In the absence of such a metric webmasters are reliant on andecdotal data such as the poll above, making it impossible to measure the effects on website traffic with any precision.
