AI Overviews cite page tops, but moving text up may not help
Summary
Where a cited passage sits on a page may describe where sites already put their answers rather than what Google prefers to read. Nobody in the thread has the baseline that would settle it.
The cheaper work is establishing which of your pages get cited at all, across repeated runs of the same question, before rewriting any page order.
Two thirds of what Google’s AI Overviews cite comes from the top 30% of the page it was taken from, per a post to r/TechSEO from u/houdinidesigns, who says the same searches are being repeated daily.
The thread’s sharpest objection came from commenter u/marintkael, who asked for the baseline: where the answering sentences sit on those pages in the first place. If most pages put their summary near the top, then two thirds of citations coming from the top 30% means the system cites the answer and the answer was already up there. The poster granted the point, noting that putting the most relevant information above the fold is standard practice. That concession matters more than the headline. Without the baseline, the finding is just as consistent with Google reading the whole page and quoting whichever sentence answers the question, wherever it sits.
A second commenter, u/ryu1984, offered another reading: the top of a page is what Google has long pulled into the search snippet, and AI systems download the full page anyway, so what gets quoted may track format rather than position, favouring self-contained answers in clearly separated sections. The poster agreed that FAQ-style sections with self-contained answers do better. Neither claim is measured, but the format reading at least explains how a passage near the bottom of a page gets quoted at all.
The more useful number in the thread is about which page gets cited, not which passage. Commenter u/woodoo139, who says they build a tool that measures this, reran 8 Google AI Mode buyer questions through the same API request about 33 hours apart. None of the URLs cited in the first run appeared in the second. Two runs of a single question in the AI Mode interface, roughly a minute and a half apart, shared one domain between them.
That test covers AI Mode rather than AI Overviews, so it does not measure the same surface as the headline figure. If AI Overview citations turn over at anything like that rate, paragraph ordering sits below the level an individual site can measure. AI visibility swings of 20 points can be noise at 10 runs a prompt, and one run’s citation list is a sample of one.
The same commenter expects the top-30% share to hold up better than any per-page result, which is a fair bet: an aggregate share is steadier than the identity of any single URL. It is also why the position finding, even if it replicates, says little about one site’s pages. A page has to be cited before the placement of its sentences matters, and AI answers have been citing retailers’ size guides and support pages ahead of product pages, which is a page-selection problem rather than a paragraph-order one.
What to do
- Record where the answering sentence already sits on the pages you care about. If it is already inside the top third, the finding predicts nothing you can act on.
- Log cited URLs across several runs of the same question, days apart, before treating any citation as a property of a page. Keep AI Mode and AI Overviews in separate logs, since the churn test covered only AI Mode.
- If a page genuinely buries its answer, follow the thread’s one point of agreement: break the content into sections whose answers stand on their own, rather than moving text up for its own sake.
The result worth waiting for is the one u/houdinidesigns says is coming next: an analysis of the bottom halves of cited pages to find what they have in common. That would tell practitioners something the headline figure cannot.