SGE
Search Generative Experience
In one line
SGE (Search Generative Experience) was Google's 2023 experimental brand for generative search — the predecessor that has since been folded into and rebranded as AI Overviews.
Going deeper
SGE was Google's experimental brand, surfaced through Search Labs, for an AI-written summary at the top of the results page with follow-up questions. AI Overviews picked up almost the entire interface from there.
If you see 'SGE' in a marketing deck, you can usually date it to 2023–2024. Once Google rebranded the surface to AI Overviews, SGE quickly became a legacy term and largely disappeared from the official docs.
That said, the SGE-era findings are not wasted. The early patterns about which queries trigger an AI summary and which domains tend to be cited were mapped during this period, and a lot of today's GEO playbook traces back to it.
Related terms
AI Overview
Google AI Overviews is the AI-generated summary that appears above the standard results in Google Search — one of the most prominent zero-click surfaces today.
GEO·AEOGenerative Search
Generative search is the search paradigm where results are delivered as an LLM-written answer rather than a list of links — think AI Overviews, ChatGPT Search, Perplexity.
GEO·AEOGEO
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the practice of optimizing content and data so that a brand gets cited and recommended inside generative AI search answers like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews.
GEO·AEOGoogle Gemini
Google Gemini is Google's multimodal LLM and chatbot brand, powering AI Overviews, the Gemini app and Workspace integrations as a connected family of answer surfaces.
GEO·AEOZero-Click
Zero-click search is the behaviour where a user finds what they need inside the search interface itself and ends the session without clicking any result.