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Google’s own words

What Google says about AI Overviews and your site

Google publishes a site-owner guide for AI features in Search. It covers AI Overviews and AI Mode. It does not offer a switch that puts you in the overview. This page is that guide, plus the Search Console control that sits next to it, with the limits left in.

What Google says these features are

On the AI features page, Google describes AI Overviews as a way to get the gist of a complicated question, with links to go further. They are designed to show up when an overview adds something beyond the regular results. Google says they often do not trigger.

AI Mode is the place for questions that need more exploration, reasoning, or a comparison. Google says people can ask something that used to take several searches, and get a response with links to supporting sites.

Both may use what Google calls query fan-out: extra related searches, issued while the response is being built, so the system can attach a wider set of links than one classic search. AI Overviews and AI Mode may use different models, so the links can differ. The optimization guide describes the same idea as retrieval over Google’s search index (they also use the phrase retrieval-augmented generation) plus that fan-out.

Google’s position on the acronyms you will see in sales decks: from Search’s point of view, optimizing for these features is still SEO, because the features sit on the same ranking and quality systems. They suggest you judge “AEO” or “GEO” advice against their own documentation.

The eligibility they actually state

Google says the SEO practices you already use still apply. The AI features page says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and no special optimization that is required.

The technical line is narrower than most “get cited by AI” posts:

  • A page has to be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet, meeting the Search technical requirements. There are no additional technical requirements.
  • The optimization guide adds a Search Console condition: the site has to be included in Search generative AI features. That control is below. The default is include.
  • Meeting the requirements does not mean Google will crawl, index, or serve the page. Indexing is not guaranteed. Google points to How Search Works for that.

Practices Google still lists as worth doing: allow crawling in robots.txt and at your CDN or host; link important pages from the rest of the site; make the page decent to use; put important content in text; keep structured data matched to the visible text; keep Merchant Center and Business Profile details current if you use them.

Practices Google says you can skip for Search: a new machine-readable file, an AI text file, special schema.org markup just for these features, chopping pages into tiny chunks, and rewriting copy in a special “for the model” style. The optimization guide says systems can understand synonyms, so you do not need every variation of a query on the page. It also says an llms.txt file will neither harm nor help visibility in Google Search, because Search ignores it.

The Search Console control for AI Overviews

Search Console has a setting named Search generative AI. Google’s help page says it was rolled out to all websites worldwide as of 31 August 2026. You find it under Settings, then Search generative AI.

The features that page lists are AI Overviews, AI Mode, and generative AI features in Google Discover. Google says it may add to that list.

Include
Your links and content can appear in those features, including as links that ground the response. You can get impressions and traffic from them. This is the default when the property is not inheriting a parent setting.
Exclude
Your links and content are kept out of those features, and crawled content from the site is not eligible to be used as an input to the AI response or preview there. Other sites can still appear, including with material that resembles yours.
Inherit
The property follows a parent property. That is the default when a parent exists. You can override it.

Google is explicit about the edges of this switch. It is not a ranking or inclusion signal for the rest of Search. It does not override Merchant Center or Google Ads choices. It does not, by itself, stop your content from being used to help Search understand language on the web. It does not control AI training. To limit training of the models used for these Search generative AI features, Google points you to Google-Extended. To keep a page out of Google Search entirely, Google says use noindex.

After you change the control, Google says exclusion generally takes a few days: often within one or two days once the control is live, longer for some URLs because of caching.

If you want to be eligible, confirm the property says include (or inherits include). Eligibility is still not the same as being shown.

Googlebot, snippets, and Google-Extended

These three controls get mixed together. Google’s pages draw the lines as follows.

Three different controls. Each row is what Google’s documentation says that control does.
Control What Google says it does
Googlebot in robots.txt The crawl control for Google Search, including Search features. The AI features page says this is how you manage access for Search, because AI features are part of Search.
noindex, nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet Preview and indexing controls for what Search can show. Google names these four when you want to limit information from a page in Search. The reference is the robots meta tag documentation. If you set one and still see the content, Google says check URL Inspection for the HTML Googlebot received, then wait for a recrawl, which can take days to months.
Google-Extended A robots.txt token, not its own crawler. Google’s crawler list says existing Google user agents do the fetching. The token manages whether crawled content may be used to train future Gemini models and for grounding in Gemini Apps and in Vertex AI’s Grounding with Google Search. It does not change inclusion in Google Search and is not a Search ranking signal. The Search Console help page also points here to limit training of the models behind Search generative AI features.

A Disallow for Google-Extended leaves AI Overviews on the Search Console control and on ordinary Search eligibility. A Disallow for Googlebot affects Search as a whole, not just the overview.

What Search Console will show you

Two official descriptions are both live, and they measure different views.

  • The AI features page says sites that appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode are included in overall search traffic, in the Performance report, under the Web search type. It also says Google has seen that clicks from results pages with AI Overviews tend to be higher quality, in the sense that people are more likely to spend more time on the site. That is Google’s observation about clicks in general. It is not a promise about your site.
  • The Generative AI performance report is a separate report for impressions in generative AI features on Google Search. The help page says it was rolled out worldwide as of 31 August 2026, and that it includes AI Overviews and AI Mode. An impression there is a time a link to your site was shown in one of those features. It is not a count of every time your brand was mentioned in prose, and it does not include Search Labs experiments. If the report is missing, Google says that usually means the site has not received enough of those impressions, or the site was excluded with the control above.

Neither report shows the sentence the overview used, and neither covers ChatGPT or Perplexity. For the wording, search the prompt and read the page.

What this page will not claim

Google does not say that a FAQ, a comparison table, or an llms.txt file will put you in an AI Overview. It says eligibility matches eligibility for a normal snippet, plus the Search Console include setting, and that being eligible is not the same as being shown. Google also says no third-party tool has access to its internal ranking or AI systems.

A Snapshot can show you whether an overview appeared for your buyer prompts and which links it used. It cannot make Google show one.

Related: llms.txt and the other crawler tokens, and why a competitor gets the link.

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