Google writes its own summaries in AI Overview citation cards

Google is showing descriptions inside some AI Overview citation cards that it writes itself rather than copying from the page. Brodie Clark, an Australian SEO consultant who tracks search features, posted a screenshot on X on 21 October. Search Engine Roundtable reported it on 23 October.

Clark wrote that the text “doesn’t appear exactly like this on the page” and is “being summarised based on the information that Google thinks is most relevant to the query.” His example was the card for his own homepage, which used the word “reach” even though that word does not appear on the page. Those cards sit to the right of an AI Overview or below it, and the text beside the link has until now come off the page. Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz sees the generated summaries on some of his own test queries but not all. The likelier explanation is a test still in progress rather than a finished rollout. Google has not commented.

A summary written per query means the same page can carry different card copy on different queries, and no field on the page sets it. A meta description rewrite is therefore unlikely to change the card text, because the input is whichever passage Google judged relevant to the question asked. The passage is what to work on, and AI Overviews already pull their citations from the top third of a page, so the material most likely to be summarised is the material near the start.

The failure mode worth watching is a page whose most relevant passage is out of date or reads wrong without its surrounding context. A generated summary repeats what the text says, not what the author meant, and an AI Overview has already denied that a new API existed because two old blog posts said so. On a card, the same error sits directly under a link carrying the site’s name.

What to do

Nothing here calls for restructuring a page, since the summaries are showing on only some queries and Google has confirmed nothing. Three things are worth doing this week:

• Search the handful of queries each key page gets cited for and screenshot the card text now, so there is a baseline to compare against if this reaches more queries.
• Reread the opening of those pages as if one sentence were quoted on its own. Dates, prices, product availability and anything phrased as “currently” are the lines that misrepresent a page when lifted.
• Leave the meta description alone as a fix for this. It still does its job in other surfaces, and nothing suggests it feeds the generated card copy.