How to Rank in AI Overviews (and Google's AI Mode)

To appear in Google's AI Overviews, a page has to be indexed and eligible to show in Google Search with a snippet. Google says there are no other requirements and no special optimisations, so the route in is the same as for classic search: be crawlable, be genuinely useful, and rank for the questions people ask around your topic.

That's the official line. The data adds detail. Studies from Ahrefs show that most cited pages rank somewhere in Google, but fewer of them come from page one than a year ago, because AI Overviews draw on several related searches rather than the one you typed.

What are AI Overviews and AI Mode?

AI Overviews are the AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of many Google results pages, with links to the sources they draw on. Google rolled them out to everyone in the US in May 2024, announced at its I/O conference.

AI Mode is a separate, chat-style search experience for longer and more complex questions. Google rolled it out in the US from 20 May 2025.

	AI Overviews	AI Mode
Where it appears	Top of normal results pages, on some queries	A separate mode or tab in Search
Best for (per Google)	Getting the gist of a topic quickly	Exploration, reasoning and complex comparisons
How it finds sources	Query fan-out, multiple related searches	Query fan-out, multiple related searches
Eligibility	Indexed and snippet-eligible	Indexed and snippet-eligible
Reported in Search Console	Within the Web search type	Within the Web search type

How AI Overviews choose their sources

Google's documentation says both features use a "query fan-out" technique, "issuing multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources" to build a response. That's why they can show a wider range of links than a normal results page.

In practice, a page can be cited because it ranks for one of those related sub-questions, even if it doesn't rank for the original query. Ahrefs' data reflects this shift.

Ahrefs' March 2026 update also found that 18% of cited pages that didn't rank in the top 100 were YouTube URLs. Video is one of the clearer ways in for brands that don't rank well in text results.

What Google says helps

Google's May 2025 Search Central post on succeeding in AI search lists the same fundamentals it recommends for all of Search:

1. Unique, non-commodity content that satisfies the reader, because people ask longer and more specific questions in AI search
2. A good page experience on every device, with the main content easy to find
3. Technical access, meaning Googlebot isn't blocked, the page returns a 200 status and has indexable content
4. Preview controls used deliberately, since more restrictive settings limit how content appears in AI features
5. Structured data that matches visible content, if you use it
6. Images and video to support text, plus up-to-date Merchant Center and Business Profile data

Google also states you don't need special AI text files or new schema to appear. If a tool or agency tells you otherwise for Google's AI features, it's contradicting Google's own documentation.

Do backlinks help you get into AI Overviews?

Indirectly, yes. AI Overviews pull from pages Google can find and rank, and backlinks remain one of Google's ranking signals. In Ahrefs' March 2026 data, roughly 69% of cited pages ranked somewhere in the top 100 for the query, and Ahrefs attributes much of the rest to pages surfacing in the related fan-out searches.

There's no evidence that a link directly gets a page quoted, though. In Ahrefs' 2025 study of 75,000 brands, brand visibility in AI Overviews correlated more strongly with branded web mentions (0.664) than with backlinks (0.218). Links get you into the pool, while reputation and relevance seem to decide more of what's said. See brand mentions for AI visibility for more.

Tactic	Helps retrieval (being found)	Helps selection (being cited)	Evidence
Building quality backlinks	Yes	Indirectly	Ranking signal, cited pages mostly rank
Answering related sub-questions	Yes	Yes	Google documents query fan-out
Earning brand mentions	Possibly	Correlated	Ahrefs correlation study
Clear, specific, sourced facts	Not directly	Likely	GEO research on AI answers generally
Strong internal linking	Yes	Not directly	Helps crawling and topical clarity
YouTube video on the topic	Yes	Yes	YouTube share of non-ranking citations

How much traffic do AI Overviews send?

Less per search than classic results, on the evidence so far. Pew Research Center analysed the browsing data of 900 US adults in March 2025 and found users clicked a traditional result on 8% of visits to pages with an AI summary, against 15% on pages without one. Clicks on links inside the summary itself happened on 1% of visits.

Google's position is that clicks from results pages with AI Overviews are "higher quality", with users more likely to spend time on the site. Both can be true. Plan for fewer but better-qualified visits, and measure conversions rather than clicks alone. AI feature traffic is included in the Web search type in Search Console, not reported separately.

How to opt out or limit what's shown

Google's controls are the existing snippet controls: nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet and noindex. Restricting snippets limits how your content can appear in AI features, but also in normal results, so use them with care. Google's documentation points to the Google-Extended token for limiting training and grounding in some of Google's other AI systems.

The short version

• Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode need nothing beyond normal indexing and snippet eligibility
• Both use query fan-out, so pages can be cited for related sub-questions, not just the main query
• Ahrefs found the share of citations from the top 10 fell from 76% (July 2025) to 38% (March 2026)
• Backlinks help pages rank and be retrieved, but brand mentions correlate more strongly with being cited
• Expect fewer clicks per search: Pew measured 8% with an AI summary against 15% without