Google SGE became AI Overviews. SGE (Search Generative Experience) launched on May 10, 2023 as an experiment in Search Labs, and on May 14, 2024 Google began rolling its AI-generated summaries out to everyone in the US under the name AI Overviews. Google has since added AI Mode, a separate conversational search experience that started rolling out in the US on May 20, 2025.
The SGE timeline
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| May 10, 2023 | Google introduces SGE as an experiment in Search Labs, on Chrome desktop and the Google app in the US |
| May 14, 2024 | AI Overviews begin rolling out to everyone in the US |
| March 5, 2025 | Google introduces AI Mode as an experiment in Labs and moves AI Overviews in the US to Gemini 2.0 |
| May 20, 2025 | AI Mode starts rolling out in the US, and a custom version of Gemini 2.5 comes to AI Mode and AI Overviews |
Is SGE still available?
Not under that name. SGE was a Search Labs experiment, and you had to sign up for Labs to see it. By the May 2024 launch, Google said people had "already used AI Overviews billions of times through our experiment in Search Labs." What graduated from that experiment is AI Overviews, which needs no sign-up.
Google's stated reach at launch was hundreds of millions of users that week, with a target of over a billion people by the end of 2024.
What replaced SGE
Two products came out of it.
AI Overviews are the AI-generated summaries on a standard results page. This is the direct successor to what SGE tested.
AI Mode is a separate experience for longer questions and follow-ups, with its own tab in Search. Google describes it as using a "query fan-out" technique, "issuing multiple related searches concurrently across subtopics and multiple data sources" and bringing the results together in one response.
What this means for AEO work
Treat SGE-era numbers as history. Studies and guides from 2023 and early 2024 describe an opt-in experiment with a self-selected audience. For current click-through and prevalence data, use AI Overviews research: organic click-through rates drop 30-58% when an AI Overview shows up.
Write for the fan-out. A page that answers the sub-questions around a topic has more ways to be retrieved than a page that targets one keyword.
Track AI Overviews and AI Mode separately. The same post covers research showing the two reach the same conclusion most of the time while citing largely different pages, so a citation in one does not carry over to the other.
SGE is a retired label. The two surfaces it led to are what you measure now.