Google will sometimes fall back to showing featured snippets when it is unable to generate AI Overviews for a query. And when that happens, it sometimes looks like an AI Overview, but it is not an AI Overview, it is a featured snippet.
We've kinda of seen this before with desktop results but now Rajan Patel, Google's VP of Engineering for Search confirmed this on X.
Rajan Patel wrote, "On occasion we fall back to featured snippets when we are unable to generate an AI Overview."
Rajan added that the way it looks can be unclear, so Google will look for ways to clarify this experience. "This experience isn't as clear as it should be though, I asked the team to improve it," he added.
This was in response to Alex Greenland who posted this example on X:
I don't know what this feature is; never seen it trialled before pic.twitter.com/s90rtZn3AZ
— Alex Greenland (@ajrgd) January 22, 2026
Rajan Patel replied:
On occasion we fall back to featured snippets when we are unable to generate an AI Overview. This experience isn't as clear as it should be though, I asked the team to improve it.
— Rajan Patel (@rajanpatel) January 22, 2026
Forum discussion at X.
