Strong SEO, relevant third-party mentions, and content that answers related questions can improve your chances of appearing in AI Overviews.
Everyone wants to know the magic recipe to show up in AI Overviews. We’ve got good news and bad news. Good, the way to get there is rooted in traditional SEO strategy and deliverables, and bad news, no one can tell you with 100% certainty how to get your brand to show up in AI Overviews, but a lot of people will certainly sell you their ‘secret sauce.’
What does Google say?
Google says to ‘follow SEO best practices,’ and while that is mostly true, the generative engine response and the search results can be different for the same query, so it’s clear that advice is incomplete.
The research
Ahrefs found that of 4 million AI Overviews URLs across 863,000 keyword SERPs that 62.9% of the cited URLs did not rank in the top 10 in traditional Google search.
This makes a strong argument that ranking well is not a guarantee for showing up in AI Overviews. This doesn’t mean that SEO rankings are irrelevant – it just means that there is more to showing up in a generated answer than performing traditional SEO.
Where to start with showing up in AI Overviews
With new clients who want to surface in AI Overviews as a recommendation, here’s where I would start:
Top priorities:
- Citation gap analysis
- Third-party visibility growth
- Query fanout coverage
Let’s get into these.
Citation Gap Analysis
Getting your brand into the citations Google already uses is one way to ensure your brand has a chance of being recommended.
You’ll want to look at competitor mentions and backlink profiles, industry publications and blogs, and even look at creating your own citations through thought leadership opportunities and press.
Based on a given set of prompts you are tracking, you can see how much your competitors are cited and how much you are cited. More mentions correlate to more recommendations, and you’ll need to close this citation gap to appear in more AI Overview responses than your competitors.
Third-party visibility growth
Once you know how large your citation gap is, you can work to improve your third-party visibility. There is some research that Google’s AI Overviews prioritizes other Google products, such as YouTube, as its sources.
Other studies found other common third-party sources such as Reddit commonly appeared as citations. But, as Google is always mysterious, they’ll never give 100 percent transparency to how they build their answers or their sources, so you’ll need to engage with an expert to figure out how to get the right placements that will make a difference in your AI visibility.
Query fanout coverage
Google also says that its generative search systems break a question down into multiple separate questions, called query fanouts, before generating an answer. Your opportunity is in ensuring your site is answering all these related questions, and that you have strong third-party coverage for related questions as well.
Maybe this is additional content on your site, maybe it is in restructuring some of the content you already have. Be sure not to do any potential harm to your current SEO rankings and efforts when updating, adding, removing or reorganizing content. Take care with pages that are already ranking and consult a professional to ensure you don’t lose existing traffic.
Use original information and studies
The more original content you can come up with, the better. Think about making tools unique to your brand, doing proprietary studies and research, having experts from your company do thought pieces, and creating cool graphics. All of these things set you apart from the rest, and give AI Overviews, as well as the other answer engines, more ‘meat’ to associate with your brand, thereby giving you a stronger chance of showing up in the answer.
Other ideas include:
- Additional technical documentation
- Detailed comparisons
- Case studies and results
- Product testing information
- Survey findings
What about schema or llms.txt or any of the other things we hear about online?
Some of these tactics won’t necessarily hurt you, but they won’t move the needle when it comes to visibility. Much like on-page SEO and meta descriptions can’t help a site that is not strong enough from backlinks or that doesn’t have content that meets the queries, these technical factors are not as much of a priority.
Google also explicitly says you don’t need to worry about llms.txt or any other special markup to be ‘visible’ to AI Overviews. Just follow traditional best technical SEO practices and you will be fine.
One last thing
The best advice I can give anyone in this AI search era is: More.
- More third-party mentions.
- More proprietary data.
- More answers to important questions about your brand.
All these things give you the best chance of showing up in AI Overviews.
Written by Sarah GilbertBrand placements. AI visibility. A clearer way to see the whole picture.