AI SEO for Google AI Overviews and AI Mode: what Google says actually works

AI SEO is the work of getting a site to show up in the answers Google Search builds with artificial intelligence, such as AI Overviews and AI Mode. Google's own guidance is that SEO best practices still apply, because these features rely on Search's core ranking and quality systems.

How AI search builds an answer

According to the Google Search Central documentation on AI features, AI Overviews help people quickly grasp the essentials of complex topics. They only appear when Google's systems judge that they add value beyond regular search results, which is why they often don't show up at all. AI Mode is better suited to questions that call for deeper exploration, reasoning or comparisons, and it answers with links to the sites that support the response.

Both can use a technique called query fan-out: the main question is broken into several searches run in parallel, across different subtopics and sources. The result tends to be a larger and more varied set of links than in traditional search. Because the features may use different models and techniques, the answers and links also vary from one to the other.

In its Google Search Central guide to optimizing for generative AI, Google explains that the system searches its index for relevant, up-to-date pages, checks the information it uses against them and displays clickable links to the pages that support the answer.

Where to start

To appear as a link in these answers, a page needs to be indexed, be eligible to show in Search with a snippet and meet Search's technical requirements. There are no additional technical requirements.

On the content side, Google asks for an original point of view and material that isn't generic. A post with seven tips for first-time homebuyers repeats common knowledge. An account based on real experience offers something readers can't find anywhere else. Well-built paragraphs, sections with clear headings and high-quality images and video also count.

• allow crawling in robots.txt and in your CDN or hosting settings;
• make content easy to discover through internal links;
• keep important content in text form;
• make sure structured data matches the visible text on the page;
• keep Merchant Center and your Google Business Profile up to date;
• verify your site in Search Console.

What you don't need to do

The guide notes that terms like AEO and GEO are everywhere, but that many of the tricks being pushed don't work. You don't need to create an LLMS.txt file or special markup, chop your content into chunks or rewrite your pages for AI. Creating a page for every search variation in order to manipulate answers violates Google's spam policy on scaled content abuse.

Measurement and control

Traffic from AI features is included in the Search Console performance report, under the Web search type. To limit what appears, you can use the nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet and noindex controls.

In an announcement on its official blog, Google The Keyword, the company said AI Overviews have more than 2.5 billion monthly active users and AI Mode has passed 1 billion. Google has started testing an option in Search Console, with a group of site owners in the UK, that lets them decide whether their site appears in these features. Sites that opt out get no traffic or impressions from them, and the choice doesn't affect rankings outside the AI features. Site owners are also getting data on impressions, on which pages appear in the answers and in which countries.

For anyone responsible for a brand, the starting point is solid SEO: a crawlable, indexable site, content with an original perspective and ongoing tracking in Search Console.