Google AI Overview Scraper — AI Answers, Citations & Brand Mentions

Scrape Google's AI Overview (the AI-generated answer box at the top of Google Search) at scale. For every query you get the AI answer, the sources it cites, the domains behind those sources, any images, and — for GEO/AEO monitoring — whether and how often the brands you track are mentioned or cited.

Built for SEO/GEO teams, brand analysts, and researchers who need to know what Google's AI is telling users and who it credits.

⚡ Fast & cheap engine. Pure HTTP over Google's SERP proxy — about 2 seconds per query, no headless browser. You pay only for queries that actually return an AI Overview.

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What you get per query

Field	Description
answerText	The AI Overview answer as clean plain text
answerMarkdown	Same answer with paragraph breaks preserved
citations	Every cited source: url, domain, title (in citation order)
citationCount	Number of distinct cited sources
citedDomains	De-duplicated list of cited domains
images	Image URLs shown inside the AI Overview
wordCount	Word count of the answer
brandMentions	Per tracked brand: mentionCount, mentionedInAnswer, citedAsSource
organicResults	Top classic blue-link results (optional)
query, gl, hl, searchUrl	The query and locale it was run in
error	Only on queries with no AI Overview (these are not charged)

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Example input

{
  "queries": "best project management software\nis intermittent fasting healthy",
  "gl": "us",
  "hl": "en",
  "checkBrands": ["Asana", "Trello", "monday.com"],
  "includeOrganic": false
}

Example output (one item)

{
  "query": "best project management software",
  "answerText": "The top project management software choices for 2026 include monday.com for visual tracking, Asana for team task workflows, ClickUp for high customization ...",
  "citations": [
    { "url": "https://zapier.com/...", "domain": "zapier.com", "title": "The best project management software" },
    { "url": "https://www.atlassian.com/...", "domain": "atlassian.com", "title": "..." }
  ],
  "citationCount": 4,
  "citedDomains": ["atlassian.com", "reddit.com", "zapier.com"],
  "wordCount": 48,
  "brandMentions": {
    "Asana":      { "mentionCount": 1, "mentionedInAnswer": true,  "citedAsSource": false },
    "Trello":     { "mentionCount": 0, "mentionedInAnswer": false, "citedAsSource": false },
    "monday.com": { "mentionCount": 1, "mentionedInAnswer": true,  "citedAsSource": false }
  }
}

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Use cases

• GEO / AEO monitoring — track whether Google's AI answer mentions or cites your brand across a set of target queries, and watch it over time.
• Competitive share of voice — see which competitors and which domains Google's AI credits for your category.
• Content & PR strategy — find the exact sources Google trusts for a topic and target them.
• Research at scale — pull structured AI answers for hundreds of questions in one run.

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Pricing

Pay-per-result: you are charged $0.10 per AI Overview answer that is successfully extracted. Queries where Google shows no AI Overview return an error item and are free. No monthly platform fee, no charge for empty results.

Because the engine is a single lightweight HTTP request (~2s), even large batches run in minutes.

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Tips for best results

• Question-style and "best X" queries trigger AI Overviews most reliably (e.g. how does X work, best CRM for startups, is X safe). Purely navigational queries often have none.
• Use gl / hl to check how the AI answer differs by country and language.
• Put your own brand and your competitors in checkBrands to get a full share-of-voice picture in one run.
• Not every query has an AI Overview — that is Google's behaviour, and you are never charged for those.

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How it works & reliability

The Actor requests Google Search over Apify's Google SERP proxy and parses the server-rendered AI Overview block directly from the HTML. There is no headless browser, so runs are fast, cheap, and stable. If a request is blocked, it automatically retries with a fresh proxy session (configurable via Max retries per query).

FAQ

Does this scrape Google's dedicated "AI Mode" tab? No. This Actor targets the AI Overview answer box on standard Google Search, which is where the vast majority of AI answers and citations appear (and what matters for GEO/AEO). AI Mode's conversational surface streams its answer via JavaScript and is not covered here.

Why did some queries return no answer? Google only shows an AI Overview for a subset of queries. Those items include an error note and are not charged.