Google AI Overviews seems to be slower with removing citations/content from its index that it serves for answers, when compared to web search. This includes when a page or section is noindexed or robots.txt out and when Google deindexes the pages or sections of the site, due to a manual action or some other reason.
Lily Ray noticed how pages blocked by robots.txt still seem to be eligible to appear in AI Overviews, and it even shows the snippet/description. In this case, it doesn’t show in web search but it does show in the AI Overviews.
Here are those screenshots from Lily on X:
Here is the AI Overview showing up:
Here the snippet is not shown in web search because it is blocked:
Here is the robots.txt:
My first gut instinct was this is a timing issue and that the AI Overviews are delayed.
Then I saw Glenn Gabe post on X that Google was still showing the sites with manual actions over the new site reputation abuse policy update in the AI Overviews but not in the Google search results.
Note, later on in the day, the link no longer showed up for that AI Overview. There is a delay but hard to say how long the delay is… Here is a screenshot of what I saw later on in the day:
Seems like there is a bit of a lag with the citations in AIO!
— Lily Ray 😏 (@lilyraynyc) November 20, 2024
Jason Kilgore spotted this also and wrote on LinkedIn, “Ready for more? Advisor is STILL ranking in AIO for “long term care insurance”. Apparently manual actions do not carry over to AIO yet.”
So maybe, just maybe, Google is slower with AI Overviews than with web search. I know Google is also slower with image search but you’d hope AI Overviews were quick…
Forum discussion at X, LinkedIn and X.
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