Citino teamWhat Google says it takes
Google’s guidance on AI features and your website is unusually direct:
“There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary.”
To be eligible, a page has to be indexed and eligible to show in Google Search with a snippet. Google adds that you don’t need “new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features”, and that there is “no special schema.org structured data that you need to add.”
So the work is Search work. If a page would not earn a good organic result, an AI Overview is unlikely to lean on it.
How AI Overviews choose pages
Google describes AI Overviews and AI Mode using query fan-out: “issuing multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources” to develop a response. While writing the answer, the system finds more supporting pages, so it can show a wider set of links than a classic results page.
Fan-out changes how to plan content:
- Cover the topic, not one keyword. A question like “best WMS for a 3PL” fans out into searches about billing, integrations, pricing and implementation. A site that answers those sub-questions well gets retrieved for more of them.
- Answer each sub-question plainly. Pages that state a fact in a clear sentence, under a heading that matches the question, are easy to draw on.
- Link the cluster. Internal links between related pages help Google understand that your site covers the whole topic.
The basics Google lists
From the same guidance, the practices that matter for AI features:
- Allow crawling in robots.txt and in your CDN or hosting rules.
- Make pages easy to find through internal links.
- Give visitors a good page experience.
- Put important content in text, not only in images or video.
- Make sure any structured data matches what is visible on the page.
- For businesses and shops, keep Business Profile and Merchant Center information current.
Google-Extended does not control AI Overviews
A common mistake is blocking Google-Extended to opt out of AI Overviews. It does not do that. Google’s crawler documentation says Google-Extended “does not impact a site’s inclusion in Google Search nor is it used as a ranking signal in Google Search.” It controls whether your content is used for Gemini training and for grounding in Gemini apps (see the Gemini guide).
To limit how your content appears in AI Overviews, Google points to the existing snippet controls:
| Control | Effect |
|---|---|
nosnippet | No snippet, and no use of the page’s text in AI features |
data-nosnippet | Excludes a specific part of a page |
max-snippet | Caps how much text can be shown |
noindex | Removes the page from Search entirely |
Use these carefully: they also limit your regular search snippets.
How to check where you stand
AI Overviews do not appear for every search, and they vary by location and over time. To track them, run your buyers’ questions in Google Search from a consistent location, record whether an AI Overview appears, whether it names you, and which pages it links. Repeat daily; one check is not a measurement.
How Citino tracks AI Overviews
Citino checks Google AI Overviews for your tracked questions daily, on every plan, next to ChatGPT and Perplexity. It records whether you are named, in what position, how you are described and which pages the Overview linked.