Google’s AI Overviews (AIO) represent a fundamental architectural shift in search. Retrieval has moved from a localized ranking-and-serving model, designed to return the most appropriate regional URL, to a semantic synthesis model, designed to assemble the most complete and defensible explanation of a topic.
This shift has introduced a new and increasingly visible failure mode: geographic leakage, where AI Overviews cite international or out-of-market sources for queries with clear local or commercial relevance.
This behavior is not the result of…
