Google publishes guidance for site owners on its AI search features, AI Overviews and AI Mode. It states that there are no additional requirements to appear in them and no special optimizations needed, and that the same SEO best practices apply as for regular search.[1]
Eligibility
To be shown as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, a page must be indexed and eligible to appear in Google Search with a snippet; Google notes that neither indexing nor display is guaranteed.[1] Pages must be reachable by Googlebot, return a successful HTTP status and contain indexable content.[3] Google says sites do not need new machine-readable files, "AI text files" or special schema.org markup to appear,[1] that Google Search does not use files such as llms.txt, and that content does not need to be broken into small "chunks" for AI.[2]
Recommendations
Google's May 2025 guidance recommends focusing on unique, valuable content that meets people's needs rather than generic material, providing a good page experience across devices, making sure structured data matches visible content, supporting text with high-quality images and video, and keeping Merchant Center and Business Profile information current.[3][1] It also advises allowing crawling in robots.txt and in any content delivery network, and keeping important content available as text.[1] Google says clicks from results pages with AI Overviews tend to be higher quality and suggests measuring conversions rather than clicks alone.[3]
Controls
Site owners can limit how their content appears in AI features with the same controls used for regular snippets: nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet and noindex.[1] Google's specification states that nosnippet also prevents content from being used as a direct input for AI Overviews and AI Mode.[4]
Google-Extended is a separate robots.txt token that controls whether content Google crawls may be used to train future Gemini models and for grounding in Gemini apps and Vertex AI. Google says it does not affect a site's inclusion in Google Search and is not a ranking signal.[5]
Reporting
Clicks and impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode are included in Search Console's Performance report under the Web search type.[1] An AI Overview occupies a single position in the results, all of its links share that position, and a click is counted when a user follows a link to an external page; in AI Mode, each follow-up question counts as a new query.[6]
Microsoft's controls
Microsoft offers comparable controls for Bing. In 2023 it introduced NOCACHE, which limits Bing's AI answers and model training to a page's URL, title and snippet, and NOARCHIVE, which excludes content from both; pages remain in Bing search results either way.[7] Its AI Performance report, introduced in February 2026, shows how often a site's pages are cited in Copilot and Bing AI summaries.[8]
References
- ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ "AI features and your website". Google Search Central, updated December 10, 2025. developers.google.com
- ^ ^ "Google's guide to optimizing for generative AI features on Google Search". Google Search Central, updated July 10, 2026. developers.google.com
- ^ ^ ^ Mueller, John (May 21, 2025). "Top ways to ensure your content performs well in Google's AI experiences on Search". Google Search Central Blog. developers.google.com
- ^ "Robots meta tag, data-nosnippet, and X-Robots-Tag specifications". Google Search Central, updated March 24, 2026. developers.google.com
- ^ "Google's common crawlers". Google Crawling Infrastructure, updated October 15, 2026. developers.google.com
- ^ "What are impressions, position, and clicks?". Search Console Help. support.google.com
- ^ "Announcing new options for webmasters to control usage of their content in Bing Chat". Bing Webmaster Blog, September 22, 2023. blogs.bing.com
- ^ "Introducing AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools Public Preview". Bing Webmaster Blog, February 10, 2026. blogs.bing.com