SGE (Search Generative Experience)
SGE was Google's 2023 test of AI-written answers at the top of search results. It became AI Overviews in 2024.
SGE, short for Search Generative Experience, was Google's first public test of AI-written answers in search. It put a generated summary above the usual results, with links to the pages it drew on. Google announced it in May 2023 as an experiment in Search Labs, open to people who signed up.
In May 2024, Google started rolling AI Overviews out to everyone in the US, growing out of that experiment. So when you see SGE in an older article or strategy deck, read it as AI Overviews.
Why the name still comes up
Many early guides to AI search were written while SGE was the only version people could see. Tools, courses and articles from 2023 use the name, and some people still say it out of habit.
The advice in them may have aged. The test changed often while it ran, and AI Overviews has kept changing since. Treat anything written about SGE as history, and check it against how AI Overviews and AI Mode work today.
What carried over
The core idea stayed the same. Google writes an answer from several pages, shows it above the regular results, and links to some of the pages it used. A page can be part of that answer without being the top result for the search.
For example, a 2023 deck from Harrow & Pine's agency says "optimise for SGE snapshots." Today that means: check which of your target searches show an AI Overview, and whether your pages are among the ones it links to.
In AnswerOrbit
We track Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode as two of the six platforms. Google only shows an AI Overview for some searches, so we keep each search, mark the ones with no AI answer, and show you how often an overview appears for each prompt.