How Google AI Overviews choose sources

AI Overviews and AI Mode are part of Google Search, and Google’s guidance for them is short. This guide sums up what it says, then how Ocita tracks them.

How a page becomes eligible

Google says a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet to appear as a supporting link. There are no additional technical requirements.

That also means there’s no special file or markup to add. Google says you don’t need new machine-readable files, AI text files or markup to appear in these features. Meeting the requirements doesn’t guarantee a page will be crawled, indexed or served.

So the work here is ordinary Search work. Be crawlable, be indexed, allow a snippet, and publish pages that answer the question well.

Why results can look different from classic Search

Google says both features may use query fan-out, issuing multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources. That lets them show a wider set of links than a classic search, so the links can differ from the classic results for the same search.

The controls you have

• Robots.txt for Googlebot controls crawling for Search, including these features.
• nosnippet, max-snippet and similar preview controls limit what Search shows. Google says recrawling can take from several days to several months.
• Google-Extended isn’t the control for these features. Google says it doesn’t affect inclusion in Google Search, and describes it as limiting AI training and grounding in some of its other systems.

How to see the traffic

Google says sites in AI features are included in the overall search traffic in Search Console, under the Web search type in the Performance report. Its guidance doesn’t describe a separate report for them.

How Ocita measures them

Ocita tracks AI Overviews and AI Mode as two engines, next to ChatGPT and Gemini, through a data provider that collects what Google shows. Each prompt is asked up to 5 times a week, from the country you set. For AI Overviews, Ocita reads the overview on the results page for the prompt; when Google shows none, that answer mentions no one. Search Console is still where you see the traffic.