Following the launch of AI Overview in the U.S., Google is expanding AI-powered search overviews to six more countries: India, Brazil, Japan, the U.K., Indonesia, and Mexico. These markets will also receive local language support for AI Overview.
The search giant is also overhauling how it displays links to source material. On both desktop and mobile, it's adding a view in the top right that displays site icons above the AI summary. Users can tap on these icons to go to links cited in the AI summary to read more about that topic.
Image credit: Google
Additionally, the company is testing a way to display related links within the text of the AI summary, as Google hopes to drive more traffic to external sites.
“We found that with AI Overview, people are visiting a more diverse range of websites looking for answers to more complex questions. And when people click from a search results page with AI Overview, these clicks are more likely to be of higher quality to the website, and users are more likely to spend longer on the sites they visit,” the company said in a blog post.
AI-powered tools have been criticized for displaying summaries but not prominently linking to sources. Media outlets have singled out search tools such as Perplexity AI, accusing them of plagiarism and unethical web scraping. Earlier this month, Perplexity CBO Dmitry Shevelenko told TechCrunch that a “double-digit percentage” of visitors click on external links. Google has not yet released figures on how much traffic its AI-powered search results drive.
Focus on India
With this rollout, Google has added an India-specific feature to AI Overview. The company had previously tested a toggle that allowed users to switch between Hindi and English search results without leaving the page. This feature will also be part of AI Overview.
Video credit: Google
The company will also allow users in India to listen to the generated responses by tapping the “Listen” button, and the company said that Indian users are more likely to listen to the AI summary responses than users in other countries.
In our initial testing, we found that some Hindi queries don't work when the sentence structure or words are swapped around. We've reached out to Google further to ask about their approach to answering Hindi questions. We'll update the article once we get a response.