Table of Contents
- 1. How AI Overviews and AI Mode Build Their Answers
- 2. What It Takes to Appear, and What Google Says You Don't Need
- 3. If You Don't Want to Appear: Four Controls Compared
- 4. How to Measure It in Search Console
- 5. What Happened to Site Owners: the Numbers Depend on Who Measured
- 6. What Site Owners Should Do Now
- FAQ
Google Search's AI Overviews and AI Mode show an AI-written answer above the search results and attach links to web pages as its supporting sources. For site owners, that raises three questions: how do you appear, what do you do if you don't want to appear, and how do you measure whether you did.
The answers are in the original text of Google Search Central and the Search Console Help Center. On August 31, 2026, a control for choosing whether your site appears in AI features, and a report showing impressions in those features, were rolled out to sites worldwide. This article lays out what those pages say, as checked on October 1, 2026, along with the numbers from Google and third parties on whether traffic has dropped, each labeled with who measured what.
1. How AI Overviews and AI Mode Build Their Answers
In its guide for site owners (Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search), Google explains the mechanism with two techniques:
- Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG, also called grounding): Google's core Search ranking systems retrieve pages from the index, the answer is written from their content, and links to the supporting pages are shown.
- Query fan-out: the model generates and runs several related searches at once to gather more results. Google's example turns "how to fix a lawn that's full of weeds" into searches such as "best herbicides for lawns" and "remove weeds without chemicals".
The two features differ as follows (AI features and your website, AI Mode help page):
| Aspect | AI Overviews | AI Mode |
|---|---|---|
| Where it appears | Above the regular search results | A dedicated view where you can keep asking follow-up questions |
| When it appears | Only when Google's systems judge it adds value to classic search (Google itself says they "often don't trigger") | When the user chooses AI Mode (aimed at questions that need exploration, reasoning or comparison) |
| Models used | They may use different models and techniques, so the answers and links differ between the two | |
| Can users turn it off? | No, it is a core feature (choosing the "Web" filter after a search shows only links) | It is used only if chosen |
| Language availability | All ten languages of this site (Japanese, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, French, German) are listed for both features (checked October 1, 2026) | |
2. What It Takes to Appear, and What Google Says You Don't Need
According to Google, a page needs only two things to be shown as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode:
- It must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet. These are the same technical requirements as regular Search, and there are no additional technical requirements.
- The site must be set to "include" in Search Console's Search generative AI control. "Include" is the default, so if you have not changed it, you meet this condition (section 3).
Beyond that, Google writes that work described as "AEO" or "GEO" is, from Google Search's perspective, still SEO, and it names things you can ignore:
| Common advice | What Google says (summary) |
|---|---|
| Add llms.txt or other AI files | Google Search (including its AI features) does not use them, and they neither help nor hurt rankings (you may keep them for other services) |
| Break content into small chunks | Not needed (Google can show the relevant part of a page that covers several topics, and there is no ideal page length) |
| Rewrite content for AI | Not needed (AI systems understand synonyms and meaning, so you don't have to cover every phrasing) |
| Build "mentions" across the web | Inauthentic mentions are not as helpful as they seem (ranking systems focus on quality content and other systems block spam) |
| Focus on structured data | Not required for AI features and there is no special schema.org markup (it is still fine to use for rich results in regular Search) |
Google also clearly asks you to stop one thing. Mass-producing separate pages for every phrasing a fan-out query might use, in order to manipulate AI answers, violates the scaled content abuse spam policy. In May 2026 Google stated explicitly that its spam policies also apply to generative AI responses (documentation change log).
What Google says will likely matter more in the long run than anything else in its guide is non-commodity content. It contrasts an article anyone could write, such as "7 Tips for First-Time Homebuyers", with one based on experience, such as "Why We Waived the Inspection & Saved Money: A Look Inside the Sewer Line".
3. If You Don't Want to Appear: Four Controls Compared
There are four ways to keep your content out of AI Overviews, and their scope is completely different. Mix them up and you can vanish from Search entirely, or stop nothing at all (Search generative AI control, AI features and your website, Google-Extended).
| Control | What it stops | What it does not stop |
|---|---|---|
| "Exclude" in Search Console's Search generative AI control | Appearing in AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative AI features in Discover, and being used to ground responses (takes a few days: exclusion starts within 1–2 days, some content may take longer due to caching) | Regular search results (Google says it is not a ranking signal) and AI training (that is Google-Extended) |
nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet | Text shown from your page in Search (this also applies to AI features) | The link to the page itself (but snippets in regular results shrink too) |
noindex | Appearing in Google Search at all | Nothing (the page disappears from Search) |
Google-Extended in robots.txt | Use for training and grounding in Gemini Apps and Vertex AI | Inclusion and ranking in Google Search (stated as unaffected), and AI Overviews |
If you exclude your site, you lose both the links and the traffic from these AI features. Google notes that content from other sites will still appear, so answers similar to yours may still be shown.
4. How to Measure It in Search Console
Appearances in AI features are counted in Search Console's Performance report as follows (how Performance data is counted):
- An AI Overview occupies a single position in the results, and all links inside it are assigned that same position.
- A click on an external link inside AI Overviews or AI Mode counts as a regular click. Impressions follow the standard rules.
- A follow-up question in AI Mode counts as a new query.
- Data from Search Labs experiments is not included.
Since August 31, 2026, the Generative AI performance report has been available to sites worldwide (Generative AI performance report). It shows how many times links to your site were shown in AI Overviews and AI Mode, broken down by page, country, device and date. Sites with too few impressions may not see the report yet.
There is also a reader-side setting called preferred sources. When a searcher selects your site as a preferred source, your content is more likely to appear in Top Stories and gets a "preferred" badge in AI Overviews and AI Mode. For AI features, your site must be set to "include" in the control above (preferred sources).
5. What Happened to Site Owners: the Numbers Depend on Who Measured
Whether AI Overviews reduced traffic depends on who you ask. All the numbers below come from the publishers' own pages, but their subjects, periods and methods are completely different, so do not compare them side by side.
| Publisher (date) | What was measured | Findings |
|---|---|---|
| Google (August 2025) | Clicks from Google Search to the whole web (Google's own data, detailed figures not published) | Total organic click volume was relatively stable year over year, and "quality clicks" where users don't quickly come back rose slightly (with traffic shifting between sites) |
| Pew Research Center (July 2025) | Browsing data of 900 U.S. adults (68,879 Google searches in March 2025) | 18% of searches produced an AI summary, and with a summary users clicked a regular result on 8% of visits (15% without one), while links inside the summary were clicked on 1% |
| Seer Interactive (April 2026) | 5.47 million queries for 53 brands it tracks (January 2025 to February 2026) | Organic CTR on queries with an AI Overview recovered from 1.3% in December 2025 to 2.4% in February 2026 (2.8% to 3.8% on queries without one), and brands cited in the AI Overview got 120% more clicks per impression than when not cited, though still 38% fewer than on queries without an AI Overview |
What this tells us:
- Per search, links get fewer clicks when an AI summary appears (Pew). Google, on the other hand, says total clicks to the web have held steady. The two measure different things in different units; rather than one of them being wrong, the natural reading is that some sites lost traffic and others gained it (which Google itself acknowledges).
- On searches with an AI Overview, being cited as a source makes a big difference (Seer). Even so, cited brands did not reach the click-through rate of searches without an AI Overview.
- Which searches trigger it: in Pew's data, an AI summary appeared on 8% of one- or two-word searches, 53% of searches with 10 or more words, and 60% of searches starting with question words such as "who", "what" or "why". In Seer's informational queries, AI Overviews appeared on 95.4% of comparison queries and 85.9% of question-format queries.
- Which sites are often cited: in Pew's data, Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit together accounted for 15% of the sources in AI summaries (17% in regular results).
None of these numbers necessarily applies to your site. The most reliable way to see what happened to your own site is Search Console, as described below.
6. What Site Owners Should Do Now
- Check your Search Console setting: make sure Settings → Search generative AI is set to "include" or "exclude" as you intend. A property may be inheriting its parent property's setting.
- Look at the Generative AI performance report: see which pages are shown in AI features and compare them with clicks in the regular Performance report.
- Meet the index and snippet requirements: use URL Inspection to confirm that robots.txt or your CDN does not block Googlebot and that you have not added
nosnippetby mistake. - Don't mass-produce pages for every phrasing: producing pages aimed at fan-out queries violates the spam policies.
- Add what only you can write: your test results, your data and your on-the-ground judgment. This is what Google weighs above everything else in its guide.
For AI outside Google, such as ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity, the crawlers and the ways to measure are different. They are covered in our LLMO article.
FAQ
Q. Do I need special markup or files to appear in AI Overviews?
A. No. Google says there is no need for AI text files (such as llms.txt) or special schema.org markup, and that any page that is indexed and eligible to be shown with a snippet can be used. The requirements are the same as for regular SEO.
Q. Can I remove my site from AI Overviews?
A. Yes. Choosing "exclude" under Settings → Search generative AI in Search Console keeps your site out of AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative AI features in Discover. Google states that this does not affect regular search results. Google-Extended in robots.txt does not stop AI Overviews.
Q. Can I see traffic from AI Overviews in Search Console?
A. Yes. Clicks and impressions are included in the regular Performance report (the "Web" search type), and since August 31, 2026 the Generative AI performance report shows impressions in AI features separately.
Q. Someone is offering me AEO or GEO services.
A. Google says AEO and GEO are still SEO from Google Search's point of view and recommends reading its guidance on evaluating third-party SEO advice and services. It also notes that no third-party tool has access to Google's internal ranking or AI systems.
Q. Are AI Overviews appearing more often?
A. Google does not publish an overall rate. Third-party measurements vary widely depending on what they cover (18% of searches in Pew's U.S. browsing data from March 2025). For your own site, the Generative AI performance report is the most reliable way to follow the trend.
