How to appear in Google's AI Overviews.

What AI Overviews and AI Mode actually are

An AI Overview is the generated summary that sometimes sits above the normal results: a few paragraphs of answer with links to the pages it drew from. AI Mode is the bigger change — a separate chat-style tab where the entire results page is a conversational answer you can keep questioning.

Under the hood they're the same machinery: Google's Gemini model, grounded in Google's live search index. That grounding is the detail that matters for you, because it means the AI answer is built out of ordinary search results. Google isn't consulting some separate AI database where you need a new kind of presence. It's reading the same pages, rankings and business profiles it always has, then summarising them.

How Google picks who to cite

When someone asks a question, Google quietly runs a fan of related searches behind the scenes — variations, follow-ups, sub-questions — pulls well-ranking pages from each, and writes the answer from what it retrieved, citing some of the sources. Google calls this query fan-out; you don't need the jargon, just the consequence:

Being cited requires ranking for something in that fan of queries. Not necessarily position one for the exact phrase, but visible somewhere in the spread of related searches. Which means the entry ticket is the SEO you should be doing anyway, and the pages that win the citation are the ones a language model can lift an answer from cleanly.

This is also the main difference from appearing in ChatGPT, where the work is mostly off your site — corroboration, directories, mentions. Google already knows who you are; its AI leans much harder on how your pages perform in its own index.

Six things that actually help

1. Rank for the underlying searches

Unavoidable and first. If you're not in the top ten or so for a query or its close variants, you're not in the pool the answer is drawn from. Check where you honestly stand before spending a day on any of the below — if the answer is "page four", the fix is ordinary SEO, and the rest of this list is what you do alongside it, not instead of it.

2. Put the answer at the top of the page

A model assembling a summary lifts sentences, and it lifts the ones that answer cleanly. State the direct answer in the first line or two — with the number, the price, the timescale — then explain underneath. A page that warms up for three paragraphs before getting to the point reads fine to a human and contributes nothing quotable to a machine.

3. One question, one page

A page that clearly answers "how much does a rewire cost in Dorset?" beats a general services page that mentions rewiring in passing, because the fan of sub-queries is specific. Question-shaped headings help for the same reason: they match the sub-queries Google is running.

4. Add structured data

Schema markup stating what the business is, where it operates, what things cost and who's behind it. It removes ambiguity for anything reading the page programmatically, and it's cheap. It won't rescue a page that doesn't rank, but between two pages that do, unambiguous beats ambiguous.

5. Keep your details identical everywhere

Same name, address, phone and services on your site, your Google Business Profile and every directory. For local queries the AI answer is often assembled largely from profile and review data, so a complete, current profile with real reviews is doing double duty: map pack and AI answer at once.

6. Be corroborated, and look current

Reviews mentioning specific jobs and places, mentions on trade bodies and local press, visible dates on pages that claim to be current. Generated answers favour sources that look maintained and check out elsewhere. A "2024 price guide" in 2026 is telling Google exactly the wrong thing.

What you can't do

The traffic question, honestly

Yes, AI Overviews cost websites clicks. When the answer sits on the results page, fewer people click through — that's been measured repeatedly for informational queries, and pretending otherwise would be selling you something.

But look at where a small business's money actually comes from. Someone asking "how does underfloor heating work" was always a low-value visit. Someone asking "underfloor heating installer near me" gets an answer that has to name real businesses — and if the name is yours, the click you "lost" was the visit to a page whose only job was to produce that phone call anyway. The defence against AI answers isn't blocking them; it's being the business they name. The exposed position is being the site people used to skim and no longer need to.

How to test where you stand

1. Search your money queries. The phrases that bring you customers, worded as a customer would. Note whether an AI Overview appears, what it says, and who it cites.
2. Ask AI Mode the same questions. Longer, conversational versions too — "who should I use for X in Poole and roughly what will it cost?"
3. Record it monthly. Overviews come and go per query and per session, so a single check is a data point. A few months of notes is a trend. Search Console won't do this for you — it lumps AI Overview impressions into ordinary web search — so a simple spreadsheet is currently the honest tool.

Want the check done for you? Send us your website and we'll tell you, free: what Google's AI currently says in your patch, who it's citing instead of you, and why.