In a blog post today, Google said it will make AI Overviews in Google Search available to users living in more than 100 countries. Google says people like AI Overviews, so the company plans to reach 1 billion users each month. Additionally, Google is expanding language support — now, users in any country where AI Overviews can get them in any available language. For example users in Japan are no longer limited to Japanese.
If you aren’t familiar with AI Overviews by now, it’s a feature found in Google Search. Google’s Gemini AI model will generate a summary for most things people search for, or at least when Google’s systems detect a query where generative AI can be useful. This summary appears at the top of the page. Besides answering questions, it can also act as a meal planner, vacation organizer and brainstorming tool, among many other things.
This update follows several released over the last few months since the introduction of AI Overviews in May. The most recent update before this one allowed users to visit websites by clicking on links within the AI Overview text. Google says that this has resulted in a traffic increase to “supporting websites.” However, some publishers and sites fear that the overviews are destroying their traffic by being the first thing people see.
News like this isn’t surprising, as Google has been stuffing as much AI into Search as it can. AI Overviews have also generated some controversy after the AI gave people inaccurate information for searches — for example, it recommended putting glue on pizza for a bit. In response to those issues, Google put some protections and guardrails on AI overviews to avoid similar strange issues.
Correction, October 28 2024, 1:30PM ET: This story originally stated that Google was adding local language support to AI Overviews. That feature was already available, so we’ve clarified that any supported language can be displayed in any country where AI Overviews are available. We apologize for the error.
