Google AI Overviews: how to get your content ranked

The rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems is transforming how websites appear in Google’s search results. The search engine has introduced “AI Overviews” into its search engine results pages (SERPs), which is a feature that provides an AI-generated summary in response to what a user searches for. The summary is accompanied by links that serve as sources for the information. 

In other articles, we’ve discussed how to optimise your website for AI tools like ChatGPT or Perplexity. Here, we’ll focus specifically on how to rank within Google AI Overview responses. You’ll find practical tips to help your content get crawled, understood, and prioritised by Google’s AI. 

What is Google AI Overview? 

Google AI Overview is an automatically generated response created by the search engine’s artificial intelligence system based on a user’s query. To generate this text block, Google gathers information from relevant web pages and creates a summary with links to the original sources. 

Previously, when a user searched on Google, the search engine results page (SERP) primarily displayed a list of relevant websites. Occasionally, a featured snippet would appear, which is an excerpt from a single web page that the algorithm deemed most useful. 

Now, the SERP landscape has changed. Google first presents a block of AI-generated text, based on combined information from multiple websites. Below that, the traditional list of relevant pages continues. 

While featured snippets highlighted content from a single URL, the AI Overview blends information from several web pages. This means that although individual visibility may be lower, there are more opportunities to be featured as a source. 

How does the Google AI Overview system work? 

Google AI Overviews don’t rank a single web content piece. Instead, they analyse multiple pieces of content, and then mix, rephrase, and validate them before showing the user an AI-generated summary. 

An analysis of the patent conducted by the specialised website Search Engine Land reveals that Google uses a query expansion system (query fan-out). This means the system generates multiple reformulated versions of a user’s search query or question to broaden the information scope. 

Instead of searching only for results matching the explicit query, Google collects content associated with other related searches—whether semantically similar, recent, or implicit—and generates the summary using its large language model (LLM) from this set. 

How AI Overview affects your SEO strategy 

For your content to be included in the AI Overview-generated summary, it must be helpful and relevant to multiple queries, not just one specific search. Users tend to make longer, more specific queries through generative AI systems. 

The broader and more comprehensive your content is and the richer the vocabulary used, the more likely it is that Google’s AI will select it as a source for its summary. 

For example, let’s say you have created a website with travel guides and published an article on “things to see in Rome”. If your content not only answers that specific query but also includes information on “best time to visit Rome,” “3-day itinerary,” “where to eat cheaply,” or “how to get around the city,” your page will have a better chance of being selected by the AI Overview system.  

Why is that? It’s because Google reformulates the user’s original search query and looks for sources covering those related variants, not just the exact phrase. 

It is also essential to make it easier for the system to understand your content. Well-structured texts, with clear, direct language and based on truthful information, are more likely to be considered, and even cited, by Google’s AI. 

On the other hand, if the content is vague, overly commercial, or lacks concreteness, it’s more likely to be excluded. AI systems value precision, explanatory quality, and content aligned with the user’s search intent. 

How to appear in Google AI Overviews 

This isn’t the first time Google has introduced new features to its search engine. SEO is an ever-evolving field, influenced by user habits and advances in tech, as well as by the company’s interests. But here’s some good news: traditional SEO practices aren’t very different from those you need to apply to rank in AI-generated results. 

As the Google Search team explains in their official blog: 

“Focus on your visitors and provide them with unique, satisfying content. Then you should be well positioned as Google Search evolves, as our core goal remains the same: to help people find outstanding, original content that adds unique value.”  

Google compartió recomendaciones prácticas para impulsar tu página web en la Google shared practical recommendations to boost your website’s presence in AI-generated Overviews. These are: 

• Create unique and valuable content that satisfies your visitors 
• Make sure Google can access and index your content 
• Control your content’s visibility to AI using meta tags 
• Include high-quality images and videos for multimodal search 

Let’s explore each of these in detail. 

Create unique and valuable content that satisfies your visitors 

Since generative AI systems rely on existing sources of information, one of your website’s goals should be to become one of those sources. 

The idea is to give the AI what it needs: reliable, accurate, original, and verifiable information. To achieve this, you can take several steps to add value to your content: 

• Perform fact-checking on the information you provide. 
• Support and cite your content with authoritative sources. 
• Offer original content such as studies, data analyses, surveys, or reports. 
• Regularly update your content to keep relevance and accuracy. 

As mentioned, it’s also essential to structure your content clearly and accessibly so AI systems can interpret it easily. Remember that the AI Overview aims to answer user queries, so the clearer and more direct you are when answering questions or explaining concepts, the better your chances of being included in these summaries.

Best practices include:   

• Answer key questions at the beginning of your content with concise and clear sentences. 
• Use descriptive subheadings (H2, H3) to organise information well. 
• Use bullet points or numbered lists to explain processes or steps. 
• Provide brief definitions or explanations when covering technical terms. 
• Maintain a logical structure: pose a question, develop the answer, and conclude with a recommendation or summary. 

Ensure Google can access and index your content 

Whether aiming to rank in traditional results or AI-generated answers, the first step is ensuring Google can access and index your website. This involves meeting all Google Search’s technical requirements, summarised in three key points: 

• Googlebot (robots.txt) is not blocked. You can check if your site has a robots.txt file by visiting www.yourwebsite.com/robots.txt. For more info, check our dedicated article on robots.txt. 
• Google receives an HTTP 200 (success) status code, meaning the page is operational. 
• The page has indexable content, meaning it does not violate any search engine rules. 

If you want to learn more, we’ve created a Google indexing guide. In short, here are some actions that help Google integrate your site into its database: 

• Use clear, optimised titles (<title> tags) that accurately represent each page’s content. 
• Prioritise text over images so crawlers can better read and interpret your content. 
• Optimise your site’s loading speed: a slow site can hinder crawling and indexing. 
• Structure your URLs cleanly and understandably, including keywords if possible. 
• Create and submit an XML Sitemap to Google Search Console, showing the pages you want indexed. 
• Manually request indexing for new or important pages through Google Search Console. 

Use meta tags to control your content’s AI visibility  

En relación con el punto anterior, Google confirmó que las metaetiquetas que Regarding the above point, Google confirmed that meta tags currently used to control content visibility also apply to AI-generated Overviews. If you limit featured snippets, you will also limit AI Overview inclusion. 

• nosnippet: tells Google not to use the page as a featured snippet. 
• max-snippet: sets a character limit for featured snippets. 
• noindex: prevents the page from being indexed by Google, meaning it won’t appear in any search results. 

These tags let you limit or prevent your content from appearing as snippets in search results. The more restrictions you apply, your content will be less visible in AI-generated results. 

Include high-quality images and videos for multimodal search 

Google has also highlighted the growing importance of images and videos in search results, especially as AI becomes more advanced. 

Multimodal search — the ability to combine different input types like text and images — allows users, for example, to upload a photo and ask AI questions about it directly. This functionality allows users to get more precise and contextual answers. 

In this context, Google recommends that content creators incorporate high-quality visual resources that complement and reinforce text to increase visibility in AI-powered results. 

Google AI Overview keeps traditional SEO principles, but raises the bar 

The arrival of AI Overviews hasn’t radically changed the core principles of traditional SEO. Good optimisation practices are still key: create useful content that meets user intent, is accessible, and well-structured. However, the demands are higher. Now more than ever, it’s essential to provide unique, high-quality content, as this is the type of information AI prioritises as a source. 

Additionally, it’s essential to broaden the thematic scope of your content. Google’s query fan-out system reformulates user searches to cover related queries. Hence, a page that tackles a topic from multiple angles is more likely to appear in AI-generated summaries. Including semantic variations, answering frequently asked questions, and predicting user doubts can make a difference. 

Finally, a clear and well-organised content structure with hierarchical headings, lists, and precise, direct answers, helps AI understand your page and consider it useful for responding to broad or complex questions. 

The introduction of AI Overviews might affect your website’s traffic, as part of the search answer is delivered directly on the results page. However, being cited by the system is an excellent opportunity to boost your visibility, authority, and brand presence online.