AI Overviews
An AI feature in Google Search that gives the gist of a topic or question for some searches, with links to web pages that support the information.
AI Overviews are one of the AI features in Google Search, along with AI Mode. Google says they help people “get to the gist of a complicated topic or question more quickly,” with links to explore and learn more (Google Search Central). They show only when Google’s systems decide they add something to classic Search, so they “often don’t trigger.”
How to appear in them
Google says the usual SEO best practices apply: “There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary.” To be shown as a supporting link, a page must be indexed and eligible to appear in Google Search with a snippet. Even then, Google doesn’t guarantee it will crawl, index or show a page.
The basics Google lists include allowing crawling in robots.txt and by any CDN or hosting service, internal links to your content, a good page experience, important content in text, structured data that matches the visible text, and up-to-date Merchant Center and Business Profile information.
Before you pay for an AI text file or special markup, note that Google says “You don’t need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features.” It adds that there’s no special schema.org structured data you need to add.
Measuring and limiting them
Search Console counts appearances in AI features in your overall search traffic, in the Performance report under the “Web” search type. An AI Overview takes a single position in the results, and all its links share that position. A click on a link to an outside page counts as a click (Search Console Help).
AI is built into Search, so robots.txt rules for Googlebot are the control over how your site is crawled for Search. To limit what Search shows from your pages, Google points to the nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet and noindex controls.
Related terms
Tools for it
Sources
- https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features (Oct 12, 2026)
- https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7042828 (Oct 12, 2026)
Updated Oct 12, 2026.