What are Google’s AI Overviews, and what do they mean for a small business?

An AI Overview is a short answer that Google writes with generative AI and places above the ordinary results, with links to pages that support it. Google describes it as a way to get the gist of a complicated question quickly, and as a starting point for reading further. It does not appear on every search, only where Google’s systems judge that a generated answer adds something to the results.

AI Mode is a separate way to search, meant for questions that need more exploration or a comparison between options. Its answers are longer, with links too. Google says the two may use different models and techniques, so the links in one will not always match the other.

Google’s help page for people searching says plainly that AI Overviews can make mistakes, and suggests following the links to check. For a business, that cuts both ways: an overview is only as sound as the pages behind it, and one of those pages could be yours.

Google’s guide to its generative AI features says they are rooted in the same ranking and quality systems as the rest of Search, and draw on the same index. Google describes no separate index for AI, and nothing to sign up to.

To build an answer, Google may use what it calls query fan-out: several related searches across the subtopics of a question and different sources, gathering supporting pages as the answer is written. A question about fitting a kitchen in Wrexham might become separate searches about cost, timing and what the work involves. Google says this lets it show a wider and more varied set of links than a classic results page.

For a page to be one of those links, Google sets two conditions. The page must be indexed, and it must be eligible to be shown in Search with a snippet, the short extract of text under a result. Google states that there are no further technical requirements. So a page Google has not indexed, or one that tells Google not to show a snippet, cannot be cited.

The same work as for ordinary search. Google says there are no additional requirements and no special optimisations for AI Overviews or AI Mode, and its guide on the subject concludes that optimising for generative AI search is still SEO.

The guide also names work you can skip. For Google Search you do not need an llms.txt file or any other file made for AI, special schema.org markup, content cut into small chunks, or copy rewritten in a style meant for machines. That is Google speaking about its own search, not about other assistants.

What it asks for instead is content worth citing. The guide warns against commodity content, the generic page that says what a hundred others say, and favours pages that offer something original. For a small business this is the easy part: how you price, which villages you cover, what a real job involved, and the questions customers ask you every week.

Google lists four page-level controls that limit how your content is used in its AI features: nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet and noindex. It adds that the more restrictive the setting, the more it limits how your content appears.

nosnippet, set in a page’s robots meta tag, stops Google showing a text snippet for that page, and Google’s specification says it also stops the content being used as a direct input for AI Overviews and AI Mode. max-snippet sets a character limit for the snippet, and the same limit caps how much of the page can be used as direct input; a value of 0 is the same as nosnippet.

data-nosnippet is narrower: an attribute on a span, div or section element that keeps that one passage out of snippets. noindex is the widest, taking the page out of Google Search altogether, AI features included.

Search Console adds a switch for the whole site: under Settings, the Search generative AI control includes your site by default and lets you exclude it. Excluding keeps your links and content out of AI Overviews, AI Mode and the generative features in Discover, and Google says an excluded site gets no impressions or traffic from them. Google also says the setting is not used as a ranking signal for results outside those features, and that it does not cover AI training, which is handled separately through Google-Extended.

Google’s list of fundamentals for AI features is short, and the checklist below sums it up. Work through it for the pages that matter most to you: the home page, each service page and the contact page.

Alongside it, see what Google shows. Search Console’s Generative AI performance report counts your impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode and shows which of your pages earned them. Google says a site may not see the report if it has had too few impressions in these features. Traffic from these features is also counted in the main Performance report, under the Web search type.

Last, search the questions your customers ask, in Welsh and in English if they use both, and read what any overview says. If it says something wrong about your business, Google’s help page asks searchers to report it with the feedback control under the overview, and the fix within your reach is a page that states the right fact plainly. The free assessment on this site will read one address for you and name what is missing.