YouTube’s AI Overviews want to make search results smarter

YouTube is testing out a new AI feature that might shake up how people discover videos. But here’s the thing—not everyone’s going to be a fan.

Right now, the platform is slowly introducing AI-generated video summaries right in search results, but only for a small group of YouTube Premium subscribers in the U.S. At the moment, these AI Overviews focus on stuff like product recommendations and travel tips. The idea is to give users quick takeaways from multiple videos without having to click through each one.

Instead, YouTube will show a carousel of short previews pulled from different creators. So, if you search for something like “best wireless headphones” or “top places to visit in Japan,” you might see AI-generated clips that bundle key moments from various videos into a tidy snapshot.

If this feels familiar, that’s because it’s similar to the AI Overviews Google’s been rolling out in Search. That bigger push has already reached over a billion users, but it hasn’t been without controversy. Google’s AI summaries have made news for errors, weird suggestions, and legitimate worries about diverting traffic away from original sources. Now, YouTube creators are sounding the alarm too, concerned that AI summaries could eat into their views and engagement.

YouTube says this is just a test and is gathering feedback through thumbs-up and thumbs-down ratings. Depending on how users respond, the company might expand it or tweak it further. It’s still up in the air whether this will become a permanent perk for YouTube Premium, but for now, it looks like one of the platform’s biggest AI-focused moves.

There’s no set date yet for when non-Premium users might get access to these overviews—they’re still in the works.