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You spent an afternoon writing the perfect little description for your services page. Google read it, nodded politely, and wrote its own. This week it started doing that in a new spot: the citation cards next to AI Overviews.
So the blurb people see under your link might not be yours anymore. It’s Google’s summary of what it thinks your page says. Which is great if your page is clear, and a real problem if it isn’t.
The short version
Google appears to be testing AI-generated summaries in the citation cards, the little source links that show up with an AI Overview. Instead of pulling your page title and your own description, the card can show a short snippet Google wrote about your page.
It was spotted by SEO Brodie Clark and reported by Search Engine Roundtable on October 23. It showed up for some searches and not others, so it looks like a test or a slow rollout. Google hasn’t said anything official about it yet.
The part that matters: the summary is shaped by the search. Somebody looking for “emergency plumber open Sunday” and somebody looking for “plumber prices” could see two different blurbs for the same page. Google is basically reading your page fresh for every question and saying “here’s the bit you care about.”
The AI is now writing summaries of pages for an AI answer. It’s robots all the way down.
Yes, but less than you think, and honestly it has mattered less for years. Google has rewritten plenty of meta descriptions in regular results for a long time. This just extends the habit into the AI answer box, where more and more people are looking first.
I still write a good meta description for every page I build. It’s the version you control for regular results and social shares, and it tells Google what you think the page is about. But I’ve stopped treating it like the one sentence that saves the page. The page itself is the description now.
If your whole pitch lives in a hidden meta tag and the visible page is a slider, a stock photo of a handshake and “Welcome to our website,” Google has nothing good to summarize. It’ll grab whatever crap it can find. Sometimes that’s your cookie banner. (I wish I were kidding.)
Because a summary can only be as clear as the thing it’s summarizing. A vague page gets a vague summary, and a vague summary next to four specific ones is the one nobody clicks.
I see this all the time: a services page that says “We provide quality solutions for all your needs” and never once says what the business does, where it works or what it costs. A human skims that and leaves. An AI skims it and shrugs, then quotes your competitor who wrote “Same day AC repair in Palm Coast, $89 diagnostic, open Saturdays.”
That competitor didn’t do anything fancy. They just said the damn thing out loud, in a sentence, where a reader (or a robot) could find it.
Write every important page so that any two sentences pulled from it would still make sense to a stranger. That’s the whole trick. Here’s what that looks like in practice.
Answer first. The opening lines of a page should say what you do, who it’s for and where. Not your founding story. Not a quote about passion. The story can come later, and it’s better there anyway.
Use real numbers. Starting prices, service area, hours, how fast you respond. If someone is likely to ask it, put the answer in a plain sentence. AI summaries love concrete facts because they’re easy to lift without mangling.
One page, one job. A page that tries to cover roofing, gutters, pressure washing and “general handyman stuff” will get summarized as a mess. Give the big services their own pages so each one has a clear answer to give.
Write headings like questions. “How much does a roof inspection cost?” followed by a straight answer is about the easiest thing in the world for an AI to summarize correctly. It’s also nicer for humans, who were going to skip your paragraph anyway.
Kill the filler. Every half-assed “we strive for excellence” sentence is one more chance for the summary to land on something useless. If a sentence could sit on any business’s website, cut it. Your page gets shorter and smarter at the same time, which is a rare deal.
No. You never really had it. You had a suggestion box, and Google read the suggestions when it felt like it.
What’s new is that the summary now shows up in the most valuable spot on the page, right next to the answer people are reading. That’s an opportunity if your site is clear, and a quiet leak if it’s not. Nobody will email you to say “your citation card made you sound like a timeshare.” They’ll just click the next one.
The fix isn’t a plugin or a trick. It’s the same boring, unglamorous work that’s always paid off: say what you do, say it plainly, and back it up with real details. I wrote about the other side of this when Google changed how links show up in AI Mode. Same lesson, different box.
Not really, not without hurting yourself. Tags that limit snippets also limit how Google can show your page, which usually costs you more visibility than it saves. The better move is making the page clear enough that the summary helps you.
Not as of October 23. It was showing for some searches and not others, which usually means a test or a gradual rollout. Google tends to keep what works, so I’d plan as if it’s sticking around.
No. Start with the three or four pages that bring in the most calls: your homepage, your main service pages and your contact or pricing page. Make the first few sentences of each one answer “what, where, how much, how do I book.” That covers most of the ground.
Google is going to describe your business whether you help or not. I’d rather hand it a page that’s impossible to summarize badly than hope it guesses right. That’s a big chunk of the AI search work I do for clients now: less magic, more saying the obvious thing clearly, in the spot where a robot and a human will both find it.
If you want me to look at what your pages are actually telling Google (and what it’s probably telling people about you), tell me about your site here and I’ll give you the honest version. Even the part about the cookie banner.
