How do you get recommended in Google's AI Overviews?

Google says its generative AI features in Search are rooted in its core Search ranking and quality systems, and that its systems review the information on the pages they retrieve to write a response, showing clickable links to the pages that support it. AI Overviews may use a “query fan-out” technique, issuing several related searches across subtopics and data sources, so the links under one overview can come from searches the reader never typed.

To be one of those links, Google says, a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet, and meet its technical requirements for Search. Gemini and Google's AI Mode are covered by the Gemini answer, which sets out what Google says about the index they share with Search.

For a brand, that makes Google's index the lever: a page that is indexed and ranks for a buying question can be drawn on by the overview for it, with no wait for a new model.

Access is where Google publishes the most detail, and each setting reaches a different place:

• Googlebot. Google says robots.txt rules addressed to it affect Google Search and all its features, which include AI Overviews, and it lists allowing crawling first among the SEO fundamentals for its AI features.
• Search generative AI, in Search Console. A setting Google says decides whether a site's content can appear in AI Overviews, AI Mode and the generative AI features in Discover. Every site is included by default, a change generally takes a few days, and Google says the setting is not used as a ranking or inclusion signal for the rest of Search.
• Snippet controls. Google names nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet and noindex as the controls over what Search shows from a page, and a page must be eligible for a snippet to be a supporting link.
• Google-Extended. Google publishes it as a control token rather than a crawler: it governs whether content Google has crawled may train Gemini models or ground Gemini's answers, and it does not affect Google Search. So refusing it does not take a site out of AI Overviews.

Which crawlers to allow for the other assistants, and why a rule at your network edge can refuse one your file allows, is its own answer.

Then the pages themselves. Google says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews, and no special optimisation, beyond the SEO practices that already apply: among them important content available as text, internal links, and structured data that matches the visible text. Its newer guide adds that there is no need to break content into tiny pieces or to write in a particular way for its AI answers, and that content people find unique, compelling and useful will likely influence a site's presence in them. What an SEO team keeps doing is on our page about GEO and SEO.

Beyond that, the advice is ours rather than Google's. Buyers usually describe a situation rather than name a product: a small team, a budget, a named use. Say plainly on the page which situations the product is for, since an overview can run separate searches for the parts of a question.

And the facts on them. Your own pages are among what Google indexes, so a wrong price, date or specification there can reach an overview. Where an answer and your page disagree, the fix can sit on either side. Which of these to start with depends on where your brand is weakest, and that order has its own answer.

You can see which of those pages an overview leans on in your own category. Search a buying question and open the links the overview shows with its answer. Where the same domains keep coming back on questions a competitor wins and you do not, those domains are where the work goes. Why a competitor comes up first has its own answer.

Those pages sit at different distances from you, and the work changes with the distance:

• A listing you supply. A retailer page, a marketplace listing, a directory profile. You can influence it directly by correcting what you supply, though the page is not yours.
• An independent review or comparison. You can give the writer accurate facts, access to people who can answer questions and, where it fits, the product to try. What they conclude is theirs.
• A forum or community thread. You can answer the question openly, under the brand's own name. The opinion belongs to the people in the thread.

None of it moves on your schedule. A page about you changes when the people who publish it decide to change it.

Google's help for advertisers says ads can show above or below an AI Overview in more than 200 markets, and within the overview itself in English, on mobile and desktop, in a list of countries that includes the US. It says both the searcher's question and the content of the overview are considered when choosing those ads, and that an advertiser can neither target that placement nor opt out of it. When it launched ads in AI Overviews, Google said they would keep its “Sponsored” label.

So a sponsored entry can sit inside the overview, next to the organic answer. Count the two apart: an entry labelled sponsored is an ad, however close it sits to the recommendations, and a report that counts ads and recommendations together overstates how often a brand is recommended.

Which pages the overview is built from is Google's call. It says it does not accept payment to rank a site higher, and that its AI features are rooted in its core ranking and quality systems.

Answers vary, though an overview varies differently from a chat. In Delphi's study of answers collected up to 24 August 2026, a chat assistant asked the same question more than once inside one measurement named the identical set of companies 21.5% of the time. For AI Overviews the larger question is often whether one appeared: count the questions that showed one before and after, as well as how often the ones that did recommended you. How much evidence a change needs has its own answer.

The free check by hand is written for ChatGPT, and the questions it sets out and what it says to write down for each answer carry over. Comparing a before with an after adds to what you record each time. Three things are specific to doing it in Google Search:

• Record whether an overview appeared. Google says one appears when its systems determine generative AI can be especially helpful, so a search without one is a result in itself, not a miss.
• Search from the same place, on the same device. Google says relevance can depend on the searcher's location, language and device. Search the before and the after the same way.
• Allow for the clock. A rewritten page can only show up once Google has crawled and indexed it again, a change to the Search Console setting generally takes a few days, and a page about you on another site changes only when its publisher changes it.

Search Console shows part of it. Google says appearances in AI Overviews are counted in a site's overall search data, in the Performance report under the Web search type, and its guide points to the Generative AI performance report for how a site's content performs in generative AI features. Both count your pages, so an overview that names your brand without linking your site leaves nothing in either.

The study publishes that figure with the counts behind it and how each was made. A brand's standing in AI Overviews is one part of its AI visibility. Some of the work itself carries across and some does not. Accurate pages and third-party coverage are there for any assistant that reads the web. Crawler access is set operator by operator: most publish their own crawler, so a rule for Googlebot says nothing about the rest.

The same question has its own answer for ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Claude, Perplexity and Grok.

Delphi measures them side by side. Each time it measures a brand, it puts the same questions to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Grok more than once, and to Google Overview and Copilot once, and keeps every answer word for word. Its score, the Delphi Index, carries a margin set by how far the assistants disagreed with each other and by which questions were asked, and the dashboard and the history page do not report a change in the Index as a change unless it is larger than the assistants' disagreement. Each assistant's share of answers naming you is shown beside the others' from one measurement to the next, though that figure carries no margin of its own.

Delphi reads Google's AI Overview as Google Overview. It searches each question once per measurement, as typed, in the market the brand is measured in, and reads the overview when Google shows one. Where Google shows none, the question is marked No AI answer and left out of Google Overview's figures, rather than counted as an answer that left the brand out. Each paid level includes one or two measurements per brand a month. It is not a daily tracker, and an extra measurement costs $49 when a before and after needs one sooner.