Did you know that sites and pages with manual actions can potentially show up in the Google AI Overviews. So while the page has a search penalty and won’t show up in the main Google search results, it can still show up in the AI Overviews at the top of the Google search results page.
I suspect this will change at some point, but for now, this is currently possible.
Lily Ray was the first to post about this on X and wrote, “pages hit by manual actions can still appear in AI Overviews, weeks/months after being demoted in organic search.” “In fact, it’s been ~2 months since sites were hit by Site Reputation Abuse manual actions, and affected articles can still appear in AI Overviews.”
She shared this screenshot showing this to be the case, she also shared screenshots of the page not showing in the core search results and the site behind hit hard by a Google penalty:
Here are more of those screenshots:
This just in: pages hit by manual actions can still appear in AI Overviews, weeks/months after being demoted in organic search.
In fact, it’s been ~2 months since sites were hit by Site Reputation Abuse manual actions, and affected articles can still appear in AI Overviews 😅 pic.twitter.com/xzm9zskGvM
— Lily Ray 😏 (@lilyraynyc) January 8, 2025
Then yesterday, Glenn Gabe noticed this as well and posted on X saying, “Yep, this is true. Just came across another example of this happening. It’s odd, and I believe Google will address it, but for now sites with manual actions can still appear in AIOs (even when those directories have been completely deindexed). Poof, gone, but not gone.”
I mean, I can’t imagine this will last and that we will see Google continue to allow this to happen in the future. But for now, this is how it seems to work.
Why does it work this way? Well, it can be some weird delay of sorts, it can be a weird timing issue or it can be a bug with how AI Overviews are served.
As a reminder, early on, we saw AI Overviews had a delayed serving issue when compared to web search results.
Forum discussion at X.
