A growing share of Google searches now return something new at the top of the page: a generated answer, assembled from multiple sources, before the familiar list of links. For small and medium-sized businesses in Hungary, Austria and Switzerland, the practical question is no longer whether AI Overviews exist, but what they change about being found.
What AI Overviews actually are
AI Overviews are Google’s generative summaries: for suitable queries, the search engine synthesizes an answer from web sources and displays it prominently, with links to the pages it drew from. Google’s own Search Central documentation explains that these features use the same underlying systems as Search generally — there is no separate “AI index” to optimize for, and no special markup that forces inclusion. Site owners can control how their content appears through the same preview controls that govern snippets, and Google states that pages eligible for snippets may appear as supporting links in AI Overviews.
Two implications follow. First, classic SEO hygiene — crawlability, clear structure, helpful content — remains the entry ticket. Second, being cited inside the answer becomes a new form of visibility, distinct from ranking first in the blue links. A page can be the source of the sentence a user reads without ever being the result they click.
Why this matters more for SMEs than for giants
Large brands absorb visibility shifts with sheer presence: their names appear in training data, press coverage and review ecosystems. A Budapest dental clinic, a Sopron accounting office or a Tyrolean craft manufacturer has no such buffer. When an AI-generated answer summarizes “what to look for in a blood pressure monitor” or “how statutory audit thresholds work in Hungary,” the few sources cited capture disproportionate trust — and the businesses those sources mention inherit it.
There is a behavioural shift underneath. A user who gets a satisfactory synthesized answer may never scroll to organic results, a pattern the industry calls zero-click search. The visit that does happen tends to be better qualified: someone who clicks through from an AI Overview often arrives already convinced of the topic’s relevance. For an SME, that reorders priorities — from maximizing raw traffic toward being the cited authority on a narrow, winnable set of questions.
A practitioner’s reading from Budapest
Miklós Róth, founder of the Budapest-based AI Marketing & SEO Agency, works precisely on this transition for SME clients, with positioning that extends to the Vienna market. According to his published profile, he describes himself as an SEO practitioner of more than fifteen years who has spent roughly a decade working on AI-driven marketing — framing he offers as professional background rather than audited biography.
His reading of AI Overviews is deliberately unglamorous. In his published commentary he argues that the companies likely to be cited are the ones answering real questions with real specifics — practitioner opinion drawn from client work rather than a guaranteed formula. An AI answer engine, on this view, has no reason to quote a page that says what every competitor’s page says, and every reason to quote the page that publishes its price list, explains its method, names its experts and cites its sources.
That view aligns with Google’s own public guidance on people-first content: material written to genuinely help a reader, demonstrating first-hand expertise, rather than material assembled to fill keyword slots. Róth’s emphasis, in his published commentary, is on what he calls entity clarity — making it unambiguous who a business is, what it does and where, so that both search engines and generative systems can attribute information correctly. For a Central European SME operating in two or three languages, he notes, that clarity has to survive translation: inconsistent names, addresses and service descriptions across Hungarian, German and English pages actively confuse the systems doing the citing.
What SMEs can do now
The actionable core, drawn from Google’s documentation and practitioner consensus, is less exotic than the hype suggests:
Answer specific questions completely. Content that resolves a concrete query — costs, processes, eligibility, comparisons — with named expertise and transparent sourcing is what generative answers are built from. Vague positioning copy is invisible to them.
Keep the technical door open. AI Overviews draw on normal Search infrastructure; blocking crawling or mangling snippets removes a site from consideration entirely.
Build consistency across languages and platforms. The same legal name, address data and service vocabulary on the website, business profiles and directories forms the entity record AI systems reconcile.
Measure citations, not just clicks. Whether a brand appears in generated answers for its core questions is becoming a KPI in its own right, alongside rankings.
The honest caveat
Nobody outside Google can promise inclusion in an AI Overview, and agencies claiming guaranteed placement should be treated with the same scepticism as those once promising guaranteed first positions. The systems change frequently, and Google’s documentation describes the mechanics, not a submission process. What an SME can control is the quality, clarity and consistency of what it publishes — which, conveniently, is also what has always worked. AI Overviews have not repealed the fundamentals of visibility; they have raised the penalty for ignoring them.
Useful references for this topic: AI Marketing & SEO Agency Budapest/Vienna website, Service details, Authority guidance, Industry context, Further official reference.
