You search for something your business does, and before the usual list of results Google shows a written summary that answers the question. Under it, or beside it, are a few links to the pages it drew on. Your competitor is one of them. You are not. So what decided that?
The honest answer is that Google has not published a formula, and anyone selling you one is guessing. But Google has said a fair amount about how these summaries work and which pages can appear in them, and that is enough to know what is worth doing on your own site.
What AI Overviews are
AI Overviews are the AI-generated summaries Google shows at the top of some search results. Google’s AI system reads a set of web pages related to the search, writes a short answer, and links to pages that support what it wrote. Google also offers AI Mode, a more conversational search experience that works on similar principles and links out in the same way.
Two things follow. AI Overviews do not appear for every search. And the summary is built from existing web pages, so the pages it links to are, in effect, its sources.
What Google has said publicly
Google’s guidance for site owners on its AI features is short. The main points:
- The normal rules of Search apply. To be shown as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, a page needs to be indexed and eligible to appear in Google Search with a snippet. There are no extra technical requirements on top of that.
- No special markup is needed. Google has said you do not need to create new machine-readable files, AI-specific text or special structured data to appear in these features.
- The usual SEO basics still matter. Google points site owners to its existing advice: let Google crawl the site, make content easy to find through internal links, give people a good page experience, and write helpful content for people rather than for search engines.
- The normal controls still work. The same preview controls that limit snippets, such as “nosnippet” and “max-snippet”, also limit how your content is used in these features, and a page with “noindex” will not appear at all.
Google has also described a technique it calls query fan-out, where the system runs several related searches across subtopics of the question to find a wider set of supporting pages. In practice that means a page that answers one specific part of a question well can be picked, even if it would not be the top result for the whole question.
If you want the source, Google’s page on AI features and your website is the one to read.
What that means for a business website
If the entry requirements are the same as normal Search, the question becomes: what makes a page a good source to quote? Here is what we would check on a typical small business site.
1. Make sure Google can actually index the page
Check in Google Search Console that your important pages are indexed. Look for a stray “noindex” left over from when the site was being built, service pages that nothing links to, or a robots.txt rule that blocks more than it should. A page Google cannot index cannot be cited, however good it is.
2. Answer specific questions in plain words
A page that says “we offer quality services tailored to your needs” gives an AI summary nothing to quote. A page that says “a standard boiler service takes about an hour, and we need access to the boiler and the gas meter” does. Write the way you would answer a customer on the phone: the question, then the direct answer, then the detail.
Good candidates are the questions your staff already answer every week. How long does it take? What do I need to bring? Do you cover my area? What happens if something goes wrong? Each of those can be a short section on a service page, with a clear heading that matches the question. Our guide on how to write content for a website goes into this in more detail.
3. Be the original source
Many business websites repeat what every other site in their field says, often in the same order. That kind of page has nothing a summary cannot get elsewhere. What you have that nobody else does is first-hand knowledge: how you actually do the work, the problems you see most often, the local conditions you deal with, the questions your customers really ask.
A short explanation of why a certain fault keeps coming back in older buildings in your city, written by someone who fixes it, is more useful than a generic overview.
4. Keep your facts consistent
If your service page says you open at 9, your contact page says 10, and your Google Business Profile says 8:30, you have given every system that reads them a problem. The same goes for your business name, address, phone number, service area and what you do and do not offer.
Go through the site once and make each of these facts identical everywhere, then check your Google Business Profile and any directory listings against it. When something changes, change it everywhere on the same day.
5. Give each page a clear structure
Structure helps people skim and helps software understand what each part of a page is about. In practice:
- One main heading per page that says what the page is about.
- Subheadings that describe the section beneath them, ideally in the words a customer would use.
- Short paragraphs, with the main point in the first sentence.
- Lists for steps and options, and a table only where you are genuinely comparing things.
- One topic per page, rather than every service crammed onto the homepage.
What not to waste money on
Because AI Overviews are new and visible, a lot of services have appeared that promise to get you into them. Be careful with anything that claims a guaranteed placement, a secret ranking factor, or a special file or tag that “AI reads”. Google’s own guidance says no special files or markup are required, and nobody outside Google controls which pages are chosen.
Also be wary of producing large numbers of thin pages, each targeting a slightly different question with a few lines of text. That is the opposite of being a useful source, and Google’s spam policies cover content produced at scale mainly to manipulate rankings.
The useful work is less exciting: fixing indexing problems, rewriting vague service pages so they answer real questions, and keeping your business details straight. It is also work that helps with ordinary search results and with the customers who read the page, whether or not an AI summary ever quotes it.
How to tell whether it is working
Google has said that traffic from AI features is included in the overall Search traffic shown in Search Console’s Performance report. So the practical measure is the same as before: are the pages you improved getting more impressions and clicks over the following weeks, and are the enquiries that come in about the things those pages describe?
You can also search the questions your customers ask and see which pages appear as sources. Do it occasionally, not daily, since the results change.
This post is part of our series on what a business website needs now. If you are not sure where your own site stands, our free SEO audit is a sensible first look at indexing and page structure.
If you would like someone to go through your service pages and tell you plainly what is missing, tell us what you need. We will look at the site and say honestly what we would change and what we would leave alone.
Next in this series: Getting Your Business Mentioned in ChatGPT and Gemini
