Google AI Overview

What it means in practice

Overviews appear on a minority of queries, and Google does not publish which. Their absence is a real observation about the query rather than a collection failure, which is why refd records it as a valid result. Google Search Console reports clicks from a page carrying an Overview but does not separate Overview citations from ordinary organic clicks, so Search Console cannot tell you whether you were cited.

How refd treats it

This is category vocabulary, not a refd metric. refd measures what AI answers actually said across repeated runs, and publishes the raw answer behind every number. Where a term above carries a claim about what causes visibility, refd treats that claim as a hypothesis to test rather than a setting to configure.

This definition is editorial. It describes how the term is used across the field rather than something the software computes, so unlike the metric pages it is not generated from the product.