Google announced Search Generative Experience (SGE) in May 2023 and tested it through Search Labs — an opt-in experimental programme — throughout 2023 and early 2024. SGE placed an AI-generated answer at the top of the SERP, drawing from multiple web sources and providing citations in a "chip" interface.
In May 2024, Google renamed SGE to AI Overviews (AIO) and began rolling it out to all US users without requiring opt-in, later expanding to more markets. The underlying technology is broadly the same, but the interface and rollout scale changed significantly.
Why SGE/AIO matters in practice:
- Publishers who tracked SGE during its test phase found that queries previously returning 10 organic links now showed an AI answer first, reducing visibility for organic results below it
- The types of queries that trigger AI answers have expanded from simple factual lookups to more complex research and comparison queries
- Content that was optimised for featured snippets during the SGE era has generally fared better in AI Overview selection than content that was not
Note: When searching for information about AI-generated search answers, the terms SGE and AIO are often used interchangeably in pre-2024 and post-2024 content respectively.