AI Overviews

Google states that to be eligible as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet, meeting the normal Search technical requirements, and that there are no additional technical requirements.

The same page says specific optimisation is not required for these features and that existing SEO fundamentals remain worthwhile. There is no special schema, file or tag that opts a page in.

Google does not publish a ranking formula for which eligible page gets cited. Anyone claiming to know the exact selection logic is going beyond the documentation, and you should ask for their evidence.

What a site owner controls is the input: crawlable, indexable pages that answer a specific question directly, with the facts attributed. That is the same work described in generative engine optimisation, applied to one search engine.

Because of query fan-out, a page that answers a narrow subtopic well can be linked for a broader question it does not itself target, which favours depth over one long page trying to cover everything.

Google says AI is built into Search, so robots.txt rules for Googlebot are the control over crawling for Search, and that nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet and noindex limit what is shown from your pages.

The robots meta tag specification states that nosnippet applies to all forms of search results, including AI Overviews and AI Mode, and also prevents the content being used as a direct input for them. max-snippet likewise limits how much content may be used as a direct input.

The trade-off is real: nosnippet removes the text snippet from your ordinary blue-link result too. data-nosnippet lets you exclude specific sections, such as pricing detail or gated material, while leaving the rest of the page eligible.

Google-Extended is often mentioned as an AI opt-out, but Google's common crawlers documentation says it governs use of content for training Gemini models and for grounding in Gemini Apps and Vertex AI, and does not affect a site's inclusion in Google Search. Blocking it does not remove you from AI Overviews.

Start with the queries in Search Console where impressions have held but clicks have fallen; those are the likeliest places AI Overviews are answering the question before the visit.

For those pages, decide whether the page should be the source of a quick answer (keep the answer near the top, clearly stated and attributed) or whether it should offer something a summary cannot, such as a worked example, a tool or a judgement for a specific situation, which is the kind of helpful, people-first content Google says it aims to reward.

Check that structured data matches visible content and that pages are not blocked by accident. The wider checks are listed in our GEO audit, and the difference in emphasis between ranking and being cited is covered in GEO vs SEO.

If you want help reading your own data, contact Predeploy AI with the queries that matter most to your pipeline; we will baseline them before suggesting changes.

A baseline is useful even if you decide to keep the process manual. Measure the work that matters, then compare quality and review effort as well as time.

Assess the workflow before changing it, or plan business AI training if the gap is how people use existing tools.