Google’s John Mueller compares the current debate around AI overview results to the early days of featured snippets.
He believes user expectations will evolve, and while AI-driven answers may frustrate some sites, they also open doors for new optimization opportunities.

Here are the exact words by Muller:

I just want to say that all of these discussions we had, I don’t know what was it like 5 or 10 years ago? Featured snippets. It’s basically the same thing, right?

It’s like this is very visible on top and it’s like, ‘I hate it.’ And then a year later, everyone’s like, oh, how do I get in and how do I optimize for it? How do I appear more visibly?

And my feeling is… without kind of any big crystal ball, is that this is something that is going to evolve in a similar direction and I think user expectations definitely change. I think AI type answers make sense for a lot of queries and that’s going to be frustrating for some sites that focus on those queries, kind of like with featured snippets as well. And that also provides a lot of opportunities.

I agree regarding us rushing to get panic by any new chnage in Google search results
yet I think this is a bit problematic comparison.

Why?
Featured snippets are way more prominent compared to a list of sources cited in an AI overview result where the only way to get to these sources is clicking on a tiny icon of link (see image below):


What do you think?

 


 

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