Google launches AI Overviews in Australia

written by Gagan Ghotra

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Late Night Melbourne time Google put out an announcement blog post saying that they are expanding AI overviews to more than 100 countries and territories.  Just couple of minutes after that I noticed a blog post from Google Australia it says that this week search users in Australia will start to see AI overviews.

 Here is what Aussies will see in the search results when looking for information on Google

Around four weeks ago Google told couple of publishers in Australia that soon they will start testing AI Overviews since then only some users were seeing them in their search results but starting this week more Aussies will be seeing AI Overviews.

Is there any functionality to turn them off No AI Overviews are part of Search Results and Aussies will not be able to turn them off. But also note that Google will not be showing AI Overview for all queries.

Don’t panic if your a business owner As AI Overviews will be showing up at top of search results in Australia, some of businesses might be concerned about their traffic from Google Search changing.

Because of course if there is a big answer at top, that moves the search results down. Therefore position one in search results will not be effective position one.

This might impact the traffic to the websites from Google’s Search Results. But some research studies done in other markets show that impact of AI Overviews on organic traffic from Google to different sites is negligible.

Again AI Overviews have links too, although the effective visibility of organic results might be decreasing but site’s links showing up in the AI Overviews answers itself can be good source of traffic to the sites.

Although I’m not sure if Aussies will actually like UI of AI Overviews and would prefer to click the links in its UI over scrolling down & clicking on the usual links.

To actually see the impact of AI Overviews on organic traffic of sites, I think that we would just need to wait and study the user behaviour.

Broad picture for business owners in Australia things in Google’s Search are changing continuously and this is one of them. Of course it seems that AI Overviews coming in search results will impact on how Aussies intereact with search results but I think that we should be hopeful both things because over last 5 years working with different sites in Australia I’ve noticed that Aussies do care about buying/supporting local businesses.

I guess that support will continue with links which Google is going to show in AI Overviews. Just need to wait and see if it have some impact on user behaviour or not.

But going into 2025 things are chaging in Google and SEO land because Google is brining in more of conversational/social style content in Search results.

And for Aussie business I think that best strategy to keep on growing is to keep on adpating with changing things …..

On 31st October I noticed that AI Overviews started to show up in my search results.

Also, I noticed that sometimes AI Overviews is just copy pasting whatever is there in the future snippet.

Another interesting thing that I noticed is Google is labelling AIO reviews as “Search labs | AI Overviews” but search labs is not available in Australia. I’m not sure what is going on with this but technically it should be labelled as just AI Overviews like Google is doing in USA.

Whenever I’m noticing any issue with AI overviews, I’m just going ahead and submitting feedback to Google. I don’t know if they will read it or take an action on it.

But I feel like it’s right thing to do. I’ll also recommend you to submit feedback for AI Overviews if you have any.

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