An AI Overview is the AI-generated answer Google places above the ordinary search results for many queries. It answers the question on the results page, citing a handful of sources, which means a share of searchers never click through to any website at all.
What it does to your traffic
The effect is a gap between ranking and clicks. Your position can be completely unchanged while your traffic falls, because the answer now sits above the results and satisfies a large share of the people who used to click.
This is the most confusing pattern in search right now, because every traditional report says nothing is wrong. The rankings are stable. The tracker is not broken. The page above the rankings is simply doing the job the page used to do.
Being cited is the outcome that still works
When an Overview appears, the useful question changes. It stops being "where do I rank" and becomes "am I one of the sources it used". A cited source still earns a click, and arrives with something like an endorsement attached.
That is why presence and citation are worth recording as two separate facts against every keyword. An Overview that appears and cites you is fine. An Overview that appears and does not is a specific, diagnosable problem, and a position number alone will never reveal it.
How to be one of the sources
Rank first: Overviews are assembled largely from pages that already rank, so this is not a way around SEO. Then make the specific answer easy to extract. Direct answers near the top, headings that match the question, facts stated plainly rather than implied across three paragraphs.
And be reachable. If the crawlers that feed the system cannot fetch your page, nothing else you do matters.
Watch the share, not just the keyword
The proportion of your tracked keywords with an Overview above them is a useful number on its own, and it tends to move a topic at a time rather than evenly. A rise across one cluster is an early warning that a group of pages is about to stop earning what it used to, which is a much better time to act than after the drop shows up in analytics.
Where this shows up in the tracker
Every term in this glossary is something the product actually measures or acts on. Plans start at £29 a month, with rank tracking, AI visibility, the daily AI readiness scan, security and domain health, Search Console, backlinks and audits on every one of them.
Related terms
Citation
A citation is when an AI system uses your page as a source for its answer and links to it. It is distinct from a mention, which is when the system names your business without linking to you.
AEO
AEO stands for answer engine optimisation. It is the work of getting your business named and cited when an AI system answers a question, rather than merely ranking on a page of links. The name is new; a good deal of the work is not.
Rank tracking
Rank tracking records where your website appears in search results for chosen keywords, checked on a schedule so you can see movement over time. It answers where you are, and it is no longer sufficient on its own to explain what that is worth.
GEO
GEO stands for generative engine optimisation. In practice it means the same thing as AEO: getting your business named and cited in answers generated by AI systems rather than only ranked in a list of links.