Google's guidance here is unusually direct: no additional requirements, no special files, no special schema. That is worth reading carefully before buying anything sold on the opposite premise.
What this surface is
An AI Overview is a generated answer that appears above the conventional results inside Google Search, with links to a handful of sources. It is a feature of Search, not a separate chat product.
It does not appear for every query, and what appears varies with the searcher, their location and their device. That variability is a property of the surface, not noise in the measurement.
How it differs from a results page
A classic results page is a ranked list you compete on. An Overview answers first and links second, so the organic list starts below an answer the reader may never need to scroll past.
It is also not the same surface as the Gemini assistant, even though both are Google. We track them as two separate things, because a brand can be present in one and absent from the other.
What the vendor documents
Each line below is read from the linked document. Nothing in this section comes from our own testing or from a third-party estimate.
Google states that there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimisations necessary.
Source: Google — AI features and your website (opens the vendor's documentation in a new tab)Google states that you do not need to create new machine-readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features, and that there is no special schema.org structured data to add for them.
Source: Google — AI features and your website (opens the vendor's documentation in a new tab)Google describes a query fan-out technique behind these features: multiple related searches are issued for a single question, which it says surfaces a wider and more diverse set of helpful links than one results page.
Source: Google — AI features and your website (opens the vendor's documentation in a new tab)Structured data still has a documented job in Google Search — it is what makes rich results possible — and Google's guidance is that its Search Central documentation, not schema.org, is definitive for how Search behaves.
Source: Google — Introduction to structured data markup in Google Search (opens the vendor's documentation in a new tab)Google documents Google-Extended as a control over whether crawled content may be used to train future generations of Gemini models, and states that it does not impact a site's inclusion in Google Search, nor is it used as a ranking signal. It is therefore not the lever for this surface.
Source: Google — List of Google's common crawlers (opens the vendor's documentation in a new tab)
What is not documented
These are open questions, not omissions. Anyone answering them with a precise number is guessing.
- Google says there are no AI-specific requirements. It does not publish which of its many Search signals decide the particular links an Overview shows, and we will not pretend to know.
- Whether an Overview appears for a given query at all is not something a site owner controls, and not something anyone can reliably predict.
- Results vary by user, location, device and session. A single observation is a sample — which is why we run the same questions repeatedly with fixed market settings instead of reporting one screenshot.
What GetCited.me measures here
We track Google AI Overviews as its own surface, using your saved question text as the search query and your market settings to fix the location. A run records whether an AI Overview appeared at all, and which source links it exposed.
That first field matters: “no Overview for this query” is a different finding from “an Overview appeared and did not include you”, and we keep them apart instead of averaging them into one number.
We do not currently track Google AI Mode as a separate platform. AI Overviews is our Google Search surface; Gemini chat is measured separately.
Google AI Overviews tracking is part of the Growth and Scale plans; Launch (Free) tracks Gemini only. Card payments are temporarily disabled while payment-provider onboarding completes, so paid plans cannot be purchased right now and every account runs on Launch.
What you can actually do
Concrete steps, each one checkable with a free tool or explained in the glossary.
Free tools for this surface
No account, no card — results in the browser.