Google AI Overviews: what they are and how to appear in them

What AI Overviews are

Google describes AI Overviews as an AI-generated snapshot with key information and links to dig deeper. The overview appears above the usual results for some queries, and next to it Google shows the pages it used.

For a business this means a new place in search results: if your page is among the links in the overview, people see it before the classic list of results.

When AI Overviews launched and where they work

• 14 May 2024 — Google announced at Google I/O that AI Overviews were rolling out to everyone in the U.S.
• 20 May 2025 — Google reported that AI Overviews were available in more than 200 countries and territories and in more than 40 languages.
• Estonia — according to Google’s help page, AI Overviews are available in Estonia, and Estonian and Russian are among the supported languages.

How AI Overviews choose pages

According to Google Search Central, AI Overviews and AI Mode may use a “query fan-out” technique: they run several related searches across subtopics and data sources and then pick supporting pages. Because of this, the overview can link to a wider and more diverse set of pages than the classic results.

In practice, this means your page can be cited not only for the main query but also for a narrower sub-question that the system searched on its own.

What Google requires from a website

Google’s official requirements are short:

• the page is indexed by Google;
• the page meets Google Search technical requirements;
• the page is eligible to be shown with a snippet in regular search results.

Google adds that there are no additional technical requirements, and that you do not need to create new machine-readable files, AI text files or markup to appear in these features.

How to increase the chance of appearing

Google recommends the same SEO fundamentals as for regular search:

1. Allow crawling in robots.txt and make pages easy to find through internal links.
2. Put important content in text, not only in images or video.
3. Provide a good page experience — fast, readable, convenient on mobile.
4. Support text with high-quality images and video where they help.
5. Make structured data match the visible text on the page.
6. Keep Google Business Profile and Merchant Center information up to date, if you use them.

From our practice we add one more point: answer a specific question in the first sentences of the page. A page that starts with a clear answer is easier to use as a supporting link than a page that starts with a slogan.

If you do not want your content shown in AI Overviews, Google lists the usual controls: nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet and noindex. They also limit how the page appears in regular search.

How to track traffic from AI Overviews

Google says that sites appearing in AI features such as AI Overviews and AI Mode are included in the overall search traffic in Search Console, in the Performance report under the “Web” search type. A separate AI Overviews filter is not mentioned in the documentation, so this traffic is counted together with regular search.

Can AI Overviews be turned off?

“How to turn off AI Overviews” is the most searched AI Overviews question in our AnswerThePublic data. Google’s answer: AI Overviews are a core Google Search feature and cannot be turned off. A user can choose the “Web” filter after a search to see only text links without AI Overviews.

For a business this is another reason to work on visibility in the overview: most users will see it.