How do you appear in a Google AI Overview?
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By being a page that ranks well on Google: to be among the links of an AI Overview, Google requires nothing more than a page that is indexed and eligible for a snippet in its results, and it writes that no special optimization is needed. These summaries, which Google calls AI Overviews, arrived in France on July 22, 2026. A study by SE Ranking of 100,000 French keywords, collected on August 7 and 8, 2026, finds them on 52.63% of searches, and 60.46% of the URLs they cite were in the top 10 of the classic results. Ranking therefore counts a great deal, without explaining everything.
For what type of question? It all depends on the search typed into Google. An AI Overview is shown only when Google judges that a generated answer is useful, and how often they appear varies a lot by sector: in the SE Ranking study, 87.1% of business-related searches showed one, compared with 20% for food and drink. This page is about Google Search, not ChatGPT.
What AI Overviews and AI Mode are
An AI Overview is a summary written by Gemini, Google’s model, displayed on the results page with links to the pages that support it; in the SE Ranking study, a third of them appeared lower than the top of the page. Google began rolling them out in May 2024. In France, AI Overviews and AI Mode were launched on July 22, 2026, on desktop, on mobile, and in the Google app. AI Mode is a conversational search space where the user asks follow-up questions.
Both features can use a technique Google calls “query fan-out”: the question is broken down into subtopics, and several searches are run at the same time. Google says that searches in AI Mode are on average three times longer than classic searches. A page can therefore be picked for a sub-question the user never typed.
What Google requires to appear in an AI Overview
Google’s documentation for site owners, updated on December 10, 2025, is explicit: to be among the links of an AI Overview or of AI Mode, a page must be indexed and eligible for a snippet in Google Search, meeting its technical requirements, and there are no additional technical requirements. Google adds that no special optimization is needed: no new machine-readable file, no AI text file, no specific schema.org markup.
Its guide on optimizing for its generative AI features, updated on July 10, 2026, sums it up: SEO best practices remain relevant, because these features rely on Google Search’s ranking and quality systems. The same guide classes as scaled content abuse the creation of separate content for each search variant, when it mainly aims to manipulate rankings or AI answers.
What studies show about the sources cited
SE Ranking, a publisher of SEO tools, collected on August 7 and 8, 2026 the results for 100,000 French keywords spread across twenty sectors. AI Overviews cited 6.91 sources on average. Of the URLs cited, 26.04% were in the top three classic results, 60.46% in the top 10, and 76.33% in the top 50. YouTube was the most cited domain, with 14.33% of citations, ahead of Facebook, service-public.gouv.fr, and Wikipedia; nine domains accounted for a quarter of all citations.
Outside France, Ahrefs measured in an earlier study about 76% of AI Overview citations coming from the top 10, then 37.9% in March 2026 on a dataset twice as large, and attributes the drop to questions being split into sub-searches. These figures cannot be compared directly: the methods, countries, and dates differ. They point the same way on substance: a good ranking clearly increases the chances of being cited, without being a condition for it.
The difference with ChatGPT
AI Overviews and ChatGPT do not read the same web. The former rely on Google Search and its ranking systems; ChatGPT writes its own searches, and according to Ahrefs in August 2025, only 8% of the pages it cites were in Google’s top 10 for the same query. In our measurements, across five corpora combined, only 1.8% of cited domains were cited by ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini at the same time.
For a company, this means that presence in Google’s AI Overviews is built first through search engine optimization, whereas presence in ChatGPT depends mostly on where its name stands in the sources it knows. A well-built page serves both, but a result obtained on one says nothing about the other.
Not appearing: the available settings
A site can limit what Google takes from its pages with the same settings as for classic snippets: nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet, or noindex. Google specifies that Google-Extended, which decides whether content may be used to train its models, does not apply to Search’s AI features. In France, Google has also opened a setting in Search Console that lets a site decide whether it appears in these generative features and contributes to their answers; according to Google, this setting is not a ranking signal for the other results.
Traffic from these features is counted with the rest: Google includes it in the Search Console “Performance” report, under the “Web” search type. Its documentation does not describe a separate report that would isolate clicks coming from an AI Overview.
What this changes for a business
To appear in an AI Overview, the path is that of search engine optimization: an indexed, fast page that clearly answers the question and ranks well on the searches in your sector. Third-party sources also count, since AI Overviews widely cite platforms and reference sites. A long YouTube video divided into chapters, answering a precise question, has its place there.
As elsewhere, no presence is guaranteed: Google shows an AI Overview only if it judges it useful, and its sources change from one search to the next. Our specialist media publish articles every week written from our clients’ facts; we measure AI reads on these media, not yet the place of these articles in Google’s AI Overviews.
What we do not know
We do not measure AI Overviews or AI Mode ourselves: our measurements cover the API of GPT-5, Claude Sonnet 4.6, and Gemini 3.5 Flash. The figures on this page about AI Overviews come from Google and from third-party studies, including the one by SE Ranking, a publisher of SEO tools, based on a single snapshot from August 2026 that may change.
Sources
- Google France, Sébastien Missoffe — launch of AI Overviews and AI Mode in Google Search in France, .
- Google Search Central — “AI features and your website”, .
- Google Search Central — “Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search”, .
- SE Ranking, Dorine Mandin — study of AI Overviews in France, 100,000 keywords, .
- Ahrefs, Louise Linehan — AI Overviews citations and top 10, .
- Ahrefs, Louise Linehan — overlap between AI search and top 10, .
- FaireDuBruit measurements, from September 4 to 16, 2026 — see “How we measured”.