Google AI Overviews: what Google actually tells websites
Requirements, best practices, Search Console reporting and controls: Google’s official documentation summed up, without the myths.
By Sébastien Monnier · · 5 min read · Lire en français
Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode show a written answer at the top of the results. Plenty of advice circulates on “how to appear in them”. The most reliable approach is still to read what Google itself tells site owners, on its page “AI features and your website” (last updated, according to Google, on 10 December 2025). Here is what it says, and what it does not.
No special optimisation is required
Google is explicit: “There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary.” A page simply has to be indexed and eligible to be shown in Search with a snippet.
Google even adds: “You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features.” So an llms.txt file or “AI-specific” markup is not a requirement for Google.
The best practices Google lists
| Best practice | What it means in practice |
|---|---|
| Allow crawling | robots.txt does not block Googlebot on your important pages |
| Internal linking | Your service pages link to each other and from the home page |
| Good page experience | Fast, readable on mobile, uncluttered |
| Important content as text | Prices, opening hours, menus: not only in an image or a PDF |
| High-quality images and videos | When they help understanding |
| Consistent structured data | It describes what is visible on the page, nothing else |
| Up-to-date business information | Accurate Business Profile and merchant information |
Summary compiled on 26 September 2026 from the Google documentation cited above.
How these visits are counted
Google says that appearances in AI Overviews and AI Mode are included in the overall search traffic in Search Console (Performance report, “Web” search type). You therefore cannot isolate these clicks in Search Console, and they reach your site like ordinary Google visits. That is also why Recoia’s visits section flags them as impossible to tell apart.
The controls available to you
To limit how your content is used, Google points to the usual directives: nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet and noindex. Be careful: whatever limits the snippet also limits your chances of being cited.
What this means for a business
For AI Overviews, the useful work is that of good SEO, focused on precise answers: one page per service, clear facts, up-to-date and consistent information. Recoia measures whether you appear in these answers, question by question, and tells you which pages to create.
Updated 26 September 2026.