Google’s AI Overviews are finally coming to Europe

Google Search’s AI Overviews are divisive. Popping up at the top of search results with increasing frequency, these summaries occasionally highlight the information you set out to find in a digestible, helpful way — and seemingly just as often dispense either irrelevant or outright harmful information. Despite their mixed success, Google’s been at work expanding access to AI Overviews for some time. Now, Google’s shared that AI Overviews are starting to roll out more broadly in Europe.

AI Overviews first hit the scene in the US last year, and after a rocky start, eventually spread to many markets around the world. AI Overviews eventually came to the UK last summer, but general European expansion took longer.

Now, as reported by Google, AI Overviews are rolling out in nine additional European markets: Austria, Belgium, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Spain, and Switzerland. Users in these regions will soon start seeing an AI-generated summaries that aim to answer questions posed in Google Search.

No, you can’t turn them off

While useful in theory, Google’s AI Overviews are often underwhelming in practice. From early blunders like telling users to put glue on homemade pizza to hold the toppings in place (a consequence of the AI scraping a meme from Reddit and interpreting it as earnest advice) to AI Overviews’ lingering habit of providing answers to questions your particular search isn’t asking, the feature is still pretty hit-or-miss. There’s no way to opt out of AI Overviews; if you’re using regular Google Search in a region where the feature is supported, you’ll see them by default.

If you want to avoid AI Overviews, you can select the Web tab when performing a search, which will limit your Search results to the classic list of blue links Google popularized decades ago.