After bringing AI overviews to the U.S., Google is expanding the AI-powered search summaries to six more countries: India, Brazil, Japan, the U.K., Indonesia and Mexico. These markets will also get local language support for AI overviews.
The search giant is rethinking how it displays source material links, as well. It’s adding a view on the upper right-hand side showing icons of sites above the AI overview on both desktop and mobile. Users can tap on those icons to go to links cited in an AI overview and read more on the topic.
Additionally, the company is testing a way to display relevant links within the text of AI overviews. Google said that it wants to drive more traffic to external sites.
“With AI Overviews, we’re seeing that people have been visiting a greater diversity of websites for help with more complex questions. And when people click from search result pages with AI Overviews, these clicks are higher quality for websites — meaning users are more likely to spend more time on the sites they visit,” the company said in a blog post.
AI-powered tools have been criticized for not prominently displaying links to sources while displaying summaries. News outlets have singled out search tools such as Perplexity AI, accusing it of plagiarism and unethical web scraping. Earlier this month, Perplexity’s CBO Dmitry Shevelenko told TechCrunch that a “double-digit percentage” of visitors are clicking on external links. Google has yet to publicly release any number about how much traffic its AI-powered search results are driving.
India focus
Google has added some India-focused features to AI overviews with this roll out. The company had previously tested a toggle to let users toggle between Hindi and English results without leaving the page. That feature will also be part of AI overviews.
The company will also let users in India hear responses generated by tapping the “Listen” button. The company mentioned that Indian users listen to AI overview responses more often than users in other countries.
In our early testing, we found that some queries in Hindi didn’t work if we switched sentence structure or words. We have asked Google more about its approach for answering questions in Hindi. We’ll update the story if we hear back.
