A lot of founders I talk to want a special recipe for getting into Google AI Overviews. A new file, a new tag, a new kind of schema. So I went back and read what Google itself says. The answer is less exciting, but it is more useful.
Google's page on AI features and your website says it directly. There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and no special optimizations are needed. You don't need new machine readable files, AI text files or special schema.org markup.
That doesn't mean there is nothing to do. It means the work is normal Search work, plus a couple of settings that can quietly take you out. Here is what Google's docs say, turned into checks you can do this weekend.
1. The one hard rule: indexed, with a snippet
Google gives one technical requirement for being shown as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode. The page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet.
Both halves matter.
Indexed. Open Google Search Console, paste the URL into the URL Inspection tool, and check that the page is on Google. If your most important page (pricing, the main feature page, the "what is X" page) isn't indexed, nothing else in this post will help yet.
Eligible for a snippet. This is the part people miss. Google lists nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet and noindex as the controls that limit what is shown from your pages in Search, and that includes AI features. Sometimes they were added on purpose and forgotten, and sometimes a theme or plugin added them.
A quick way to check one page from your terminal:
# Look for snippet controls in the HTML meta tags
curl -s https://yourdomain.com/pricing | grep -iE 'nosnippet|max-snippet|noindex'
# Look for the same controls sent as an HTTP header
curl -sI https://yourdomain.com/pricing | grep -i 'x-robots-tag'
If nothing comes back, good. If you see nosnippet or a very small max-snippet value, ask why it is there. A data-nosnippet attribute on a block of text hides only that block, so check it isn't wrapped around the paragraph that actually explains your product.
Remember that Googlebot may see different HTML than your browser. The URL Inspection tool shows the HTML Google received when it crawled the page, which is the version that counts.
2. Google-Extended is not what many people think
This is the setting I would check first, because it is easy to get wrong in both directions.
Google's list of common crawlers describes Google-Extended as a robots.txt token. It doesn't crawl on its own. It controls whether content Google crawls from your site may be used for two things:
- training future Gemini models
- grounding in Gemini Apps and in Grounding with Google Search on Vertex AI. Grounding means giving the model content from the Google Search index at the moment someone asks a question.
The same page also says Google-Extended does not affect inclusion in Google Search and is not a ranking signal.
So here is the trade-off in plain words:
- Blocking
Google-Extendeddoes not remove you from Google Search, and Google's AI features doc says the control for AI Overviews and AI Mode is Googlebot plus the snippet controls above. - Blocking
Google-Extendeddoes opt your content out of grounding in the Gemini app.
Some sites added a block like this when AI training became a hot topic:
User-agent: Google-Extended
Disallow: /
That is a fair choice if you don't want your content used for training. But if you want to show up when someone asks Gemini about your category, you have turned that off too. Make the choice on purpose.
Open https://yourdomain.com/robots.txt now and look for Google-Extended. Also check that you aren't blocking Googlebot from pages you care about. Google says robots.txt rules for Googlebot are the control for how your site is crawled for Search, and its list of SEO basics includes allowing crawling "by any CDN or hosting infrastructure". Some bot protection settings block crawlers even when robots.txt allows them, so a clean robots.txt is not the whole story.
3. Write for the follow-up questions, not only the main one
Google's doc explains that AI Overviews and AI Mode may use a "query fan-out" technique. That means issuing several related searches across subtopics to build one answer. It also says AI Mode is meant for questions that need more exploration or comparison.
So the answer is built from the smaller questions around the main one. For a typical SaaS product, those are things like:
- Who is it for, and who is it not for?
- How does it compare with the usual alternative?
- What does it cost, and is there a free trial?
- How long does setup take?
- What does it not do?
If those answers only live in sales calls or support chats, there is nothing on the open web for Google to link to. You don't need a new page for each. A clear section on an existing page, with the answer in plain text near the top, is often enough. Google's own list of best practices includes "making sure that important content is available in textual form". So an answer that only exists in an image, a video, or a tab that needs a click to load is harder to use.
4. Measure in the place Google points you to
People often ask how to see AI Overviews traffic on its own. Google's answer, on the same page, is that sites showing in AI Overviews and AI Mode are counted in the overall search traffic in Search Console. It sits in the Performance report under the "Web" search type. It isn't split out as its own line.
That changes how I'd measure. You can't open one report that says "AI Overviews: X clicks". What you can do:
- Pick a short list of real buyer questions in your category, plus the pages you want to be linked for.
- In Search Console, watch impressions and clicks for those queries and pages over weeks, not days.
- Every so often, search those questions yourself in a logged out browser. Note whether an AI Overview shows up, which sites it links to, and whether you are one of them.
- Ask the same questions in the Gemini app and note who it names.
Google also says AI Overviews often don't show up at all, because they only appear when Google decides they add something beyond the normal results. So "no AI Overview for this query" is a normal result. It is not a sign you did something wrong.
One check tells you very little. Checks spread over a couple of months start to show a pattern.
A 20-minute checklist
- [ ] URL Inspection: your top 3 pages are indexed.
- [ ] No unwanted
nosnippet,max-snippetornoindexin the HTML orX-Robots-Tagheader. - [ ]
data-nosnippetisn't hiding your main product description. - [ ] robots.txt:
Googlebotcan reach important pages, and anyGoogle-Extendedrule is a choice you made on purpose. - [ ] Your CDN or bot protection isn't blocking Googlebot.
- [ ] The common follow-up questions about your product are answered in plain text somewhere on the site.
- [ ] You have a short list of buyer questions to check again in a few weeks.
Where I'd start
None of this is a trick, and Google is clear that meeting every requirement still doesn't guarantee a page will be crawled, indexed or shown. But the snippet controls and the Google-Extended rule are two settings that can quietly take you out, and they take minutes to check.
Disclosure: I work at Serpair. We build a growth-journey tracker that keeps a history of your Google rankings, AI mentions and competitors, so you can see which changes actually worked. If you want a quick first snapshot before you start changing things, there is a free Insights check that runs from your public domain, with no signup. The checklist above works fine without it, though.
If you find a forgotten nosnippet or Google-Extended rule on your own site, I'd like to hear what it was doing there.
Top comments (1)
This is very useful