AI features and your website

This guide covers how AI features like AI Overviews and AI Mode work in Google Search from a site
owner’s perspective and how to approach your content’s inclusion in these experiences.

How AI features work in Search

As with Search overall, the AI features AI Overviews
and AI Mode surface relevant links to help people find the information they’re
looking for quickly and reliably, as well as to help them explore content they may not have
discovered before. These features offer unique opportunities for more types of sites to appear.

AI Overviews help people get to the gist of a complicated topic or question more
quickly, and provide a jumping off point to explore links to learn more. They were designed to
show up on queries where they can add additional benefits beyond what people might already get on
Search. With AI Overviews, people have been visiting a greater diversity of websites for help with
more complex questions.

AI Mode is particularly helpful for queries where further exploration, reasoning,
or complex comparisons are needed. People can ask nuanced questions that might have previously
taken multiple searches — from exploring a new concept, to comparing options, and beyond — and
get a comprehensive AI-powered response with links to supporting websites.

Both AI Overviews and AI Mode may use a “query fan-out” technique — issuing multiple related
searches across subtopics and data sources — to develop a response. While responses are being
generated, our advanced models identify more supporting web pages, allowing us to
display a wider and more diverse set of helpful links associated with the
response than with a classic web search, enabling new opportunities for exploration.

AI Mode and AI Overviews may use different models and techniques, so the set of responses and
links they show will vary. AI Overviews are only shown when our systems determine that it is
additive to classic Search, and as such, often don’t trigger.

How to appear in AI features

You can apply the same foundational SEO best practices for
AI features as you do for Google Search overall: making sure the page meets the
technical requirements for Google Search,
following Search policies,
and focusing on the key best practices,
such as creating helpful, reliable, people-first content.

Technical requirements for appearing in AI features

To be eligible to be shown as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, a page must be indexed
and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet, fulfilling the
Search technical requirements. There are no
additional technical requirements.

SEO best practices

While specific optimization isn’t required for AI Overviews and AI Mode, all existing
SEO fundamentals continue to be
worthwhile, for example:

• Ensuring that crawling is allowed in robots.txt, and by any CDN or hosting infrastructure
• Making your content easily findable through internal links
  on your website
• Providing a great page experience for
  users
• Making sure that important content is available in textual form
• Supporting your textual content with high-quality images
  and videos, when applicable
• Making sure your structured data
  matches the visible text on the page
• Checking that your Merchant Center
  and Business Profile information is up-to-date

To discover and diagnose potential technical issues quickly, verify your site
in Search Console.

Measuring the performance of your site

Just like the rest of the search results page, sites appearing in AI features (such as AI Overviews
and AI Mode) are included in the overall search traffic in
Search Console.
In particular, they’re reported on in the Performance report,
within the “Web” search type.
Learn more about how AI Overviews
and AI Mode are counted
towards the overall data in Search Console, how to
analyze traffic changes
overall, and how to combine Search Console and Analytics data.

In addition to Search Console, you could also track conversions and time spent on your site in
other tools, such as Google Analytics. We’ve seen that when people click from search results
pages with AI Overviews, these clicks are higher quality (meaning, users are more likely to spend
more time on the site).

Controlling your content in AI features in Search

AI is built into Search and integral to how Search functions, which is why robots.txt directives
for Googlebot is the control
for site owners to manage access to how their sites are crawled for Search. To limit the
information shown from your pages in Search, use nosnippet,
data-nosnippet, max-snippet, or
noindex controls.

To limit AI training and grounding in some of Google’s other systems, read more
about Google-Extended.

Troubleshooting preview controls

If you implemented preview controls and
you’re still seeing your content appear in AI features on Search, try the following steps:

1. Make sure that the preview control is correct and visible to Googlebot. To test if your implementation is
   correct, use the
   URL
   Inspection tool to see the HTML that Googlebot received while crawling the page.
2. Allow time for Google to recrawl and process the change in preview controls.
   Remember that crawling can take anywhere from several days to several months, depending on
   how often our systems determine a page needs to be refreshed. If you’ve made changes, you can
   request
   that Google recrawl your pages.

If you tried the troubleshooting steps and still find issues, post in the
Google Search Central Help Community.