Why Medical and Legal Sites Appear Less Frequently in AI Overviews

The idea that medical and legal sites are cited less often in AI Overviews mixes two different things. One is whether an AI Overview appears at all for health and legal searches. The other is which sites get cited when one does. The public evidence says more about the first than the second, and what it says is not simple. Google has added extra restrictions on when AI Overviews appear for health queries. Its systems give more weight to trust on these topics. And the sources that do get cited lean toward official and institutional sites. Together, these offer plausible reasons why a practice or firm website may see fewer citations, without proving that medical and legal sites as a group are cited less.

Health, finance and safety topics, and many legal questions, fall under what Google calls “Your Money or Your Life” subjects, where mistakes can cause real harm. That status shapes every layer described below.

Google holds back on some health queries

Google has said publicly that it limits AI Overviews on health topics. In a May 2024 post on AI Overview errors, Liz Reid of Google wrote: “In the case of health, we launched additional triggering refinements to enhance our quality protections.” The same post says that “for topics like news and health, we already have strong guardrails in place.”

If fewer health queries show an AI Overview, there are fewer chances for any site to be cited on them. Part of the “less frequently” effect is therefore not about the sites at all. It is about how often the feature appears.

Third-party measurement shows how much this can move. Semrush’s AI Overviews study, which tracked more than 10 million keywords in 2025, reported a large rise in AI Overview coverage for Health and for Law and Government queries. It also found that between March and November 2025, Health was one of the two industries with the greatest decreases in AI Overview share. Coverage of sensitive topics has gone up and down, which is one more reason not to treat any single snapshot as a permanent rule.

The trust bar is higher on these topics

When an AI Overview does appear for a health or legal query, the sites eligible to be cited face a stricter standard. Google’s guidance on creating helpful content says its systems “give even more weight to content that aligns with strong E-E-A-T for topics that could significantly impact the health, financial stability, or safety of people, or the welfare or well-being of society.”

AI Overviews retrieve pages through Google’s core ranking systems, according to Google’s AI optimization guide. Where those systems apply a higher trust bar, fewer pages clear it, and the candidate pool for a citation is narrower. Google does not state this link outright; it follows from how the two documents fit together. Google has not published a separate citation rule for health or legal content.

Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines show the categories it treats this way. The September 2025 edition lists YMYL topics under headings including Health or Safety, Financial Security, and Government, Civics and Society. Legal questions can fall under these. The guidelines inform how Google evaluates its systems; Google says raters have no control over how pages rank.

Official sources take a larger share

A measured pattern concerns which sites fill the citation slots. In a Pew Research Center analysis of searches made by 900 U.S. adults in March 2025, 6% of the sources linked in AI summaries were .gov sites, compared with 2% of the links in standard search results.

That figure covers all topics, not only health or law, so it cannot be read as a measurement of medical or legal citations. It does show a direction: AI summaries cited government sources at three times the rate standard results listed them. On health and legal questions, official sources such as health agencies, courts and legislatures are natural candidates. When they are available, they compete for the same few slots a practice or firm website would want.

What the evidence does not show

No study reviewed here measured how often medical or legal websites are cited in AI Overviews compared with other kinds of sites. The common claim that they appear “less frequently” is plausible for the reasons above, but it is not a measured fact. Three cautions follow.

• The feature and the citation are different questions. Fewer overviews on some health queries reduce citations for everyone, including the most authoritative sites.
• Medical and legal sites are not one group. A national health institution, a hospital system, a legal publisher and a small practice website sit in very different positions.
• Coverage changes. Semrush’s 2025 data shows sensitive categories moving in both directions within a single year.

What medical and legal publishers can do

The levers are the same ones that matter for ranking on YMYL topics, applied with more care.

1. Show who is responsible for the content. Name the author and, where relevant, the reviewer, with their real qualifications. Google’s helpful content guidance asks whether it is clear who created content and encourages accurate bylines.
2. Cite primary sources. Link to the statute, regulation, court decision, clinical guideline or agency page that supports each important claim. A reader, and a system, should be able to trace the claim.
3. Separate general information from advice. Explain what the law or the evidence says in general terms, and say plainly where an individual’s situation requires a professional.
4. Keep facts current. Laws, guidelines and drug information change. Date your content and review it when the underlying source changes.
5. Offer what official sources do not. Agencies and courts publish the rule. A practice or firm can explain how it applies in common situations, what the process looks like, and what questions to ask. That is information an official source may not provide, and it is the kind of non-commodity content Google’s AI guide describes.
6. Check your eligibility settings. Confirm that pages are indexed, eligible to show a snippet and not excluded in Search Console’s Search generative AI control.

Medical and legal publishers should judge their AI Overview performance against the right baseline: fewer overviews on some health queries, a higher trust standard, and official sources competing for the same slots. Within that, the strongest candidates for citation are the pages that state who stands behind them, trace every claim to its source and add practical understanding that the official record does not.