How to appear in Google AI Overviews and AI Mode

The technical requirements

To be shown as a supporting link, a page must be indexed and eligible to appear in Google Search with a snippet. There are no additional technical requirements (Google Search Central). In practice, that means checking the basics:

• Googlebot is allowed in robots.txt and not blocked by a firewall or CDN.
• The page returns status 200 and is not marked noindex.
• The important content is in the HTML as text, not only in images or loaded by scripts after interaction.
• The page is reachable through internal links. Listing it in your sitemap helps Google find it, but is not a requirement.

The controls you have

AI features respect the same preview controls as normal snippets. nosnippet keeps a page out of snippets and AI features, max-snippet limits how much text can be shown, and data-nosnippet excludes specific parts of a page. noindex removes the page from Search entirely.

Blocking Google-Extended does not remove a page from AI Overviews or AI Mode. According to Google's documentation on AI features, it limits training and grounding in some of Google's other AI systems, such as Gemini. Google's crawler documentation adds that Google-Extended does not affect inclusion in Google Search. Since 31 August 2026 there is also a site-level setting in Search Console (Settings > Search generative AI) that excludes a site from AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative AI in Discover without affecting normal results (Search Console Help).

What makes content easier to cite

• Answer the main question of the page early and directly, then add detail.
• Use clear headings that match how people ask, so each section can stand on its own.
• State concrete facts: prices or price ranges, service areas, lead times, specifications, dates.
• Show who is behind the content: company details, author, experience, contact information.
• Keep structured data consistent with the visible page.
• Update pages when facts change, and show the update date.

Measuring the effect

Search Console now has a dedicated generative AI performance report. It counts impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode, meaning how often links to your pages were shown in these features, by page, country, device and date, and it can be filtered by text or multimodal (image) search. It does not include Search Labs experiments; you may not see it if your property has too few impressions or the site is excluded from generative AI features. This data also remains part of the overall Performance report under the Web search type, so keep watching queries and pages there over time as well.

Google states that it rolled this report out to all websites worldwide as of 31 August 2026.

What Sitequiry can and cannot check

Sitequiry can inspect technical signals such as indexing hints, structured data, titles, visible content structure and crawler access. It cannot promise inclusion in an AI answer, and a readiness score is not an AI-search ranking.

Check your site's technical readiness with a free analysis, or check which AI crawlers your robots.txt allows.

Frequently asked questions