Guides · AI Overviews
How do you appear in Google's AI Overviews?
There is no way to submit to AI Overviews: Google draws them from pages already in its index, so the requirements are being indexed, being readable without JavaScript, and answering the question in a passage that can stand on its own.
Where the text comes from
AI Overviews are generated from pages Google has already crawled and indexed. There is no separate index, no submission form, and no markup that opts a page in.
That has a blunt consequence worth stating first: a page that is not indexed cannot appear in one, and a page that is blocked in robots.txt or marked noindex has removed itself from consideration. Most sites asking how to appear in AI Overviews have a prior problem.
What makes a passage usable
A question asked as a heading, in the words people use, with the answer immediately underneath. Overviews are assembled from passages, and a passage that needs the three paragraphs above it to make sense is not one.
Plain sentences rather than marketing. A sentence that says what something is can be lifted; a sentence that says a company is the leading provider of innovative solutions cannot be lifted into anything.
FAQ or QA structured data where the page really is a set of questions and answers. It does not guarantee inclusion — nothing does — but it makes the shape of the content explicit rather than something to be inferred.
And the words present in the HTML, for the same reason as everywhere else on this list.
Being cited, and being replaced
The honest tension is that an Overview can answer the question so completely that nobody clicks. This is real and it is not something anybody can optimise their way out of.
What follows from it is a strategy rather than a trick: the pages worth winning here are the ones where the answer creates the next question. A definition that ends the enquiry earns a citation and no visit. An explanation that shows somebody they have a problem earns both.
If you would rather not appear
The nosnippet and max-snippet directives limit what can be shown, and Google honours them for Overviews as for ordinary results. The cost is that they limit ordinary snippets too, and a result with no snippet is a result with fewer clicks.
There is no setting that keeps you in search and out of Overviews. Anybody offering one is describing something that does not exist.
Does this apply to your site?
We check for this automatically, along with everything else on the same page of your site, and tell you the exact line. The first audit is on us.