Google AI Overviews

Google AI Overviews are the generated summaries Google places above the ordinary results on some searches, written from pages in its index and linked to the pages it drew on. They are part of Google Search, not a separate product with its own rules.

How a page gets in

Google’s own guidance is short on this point: there are no extra requirements, no special schema and no file to add. A page that is eligible for Search is eligible for the overview. The system issues several related searches for one question, a fan-out, and Google says this brings in a broader set of links than a single results page would. Impressions and clicks from the overviews appear in Search Console under the Web search type, mixed with ordinary results, so a site cannot separate them there.

The controls are the ones Search already has. noindex keeps a page out entirely. nosnippet keeps its text out of any preview, data-nosnippet fences off a span, and max-snippet caps how much can be shown; Google says these behave in AI features exactly as they do elsewhere. Which passage is used is decided the same way a featured snippet is: by what on the page answers the question by itself.

A question owners ask

Does blocking Google-Extended remove a site from AI Overviews?

Google’s documentation does not say that it does. The Google-Extended token governs whether content is used to train Gemini models and to ground Gemini apps and Vertex AI, and the same page says the token does not affect inclusion in Search and is not a ranking signal. Its AI-features page says that access to AI Overviews and AI Mode is controlled by the robots.txt rules for Googlebot and by the preview controls. A site that wants out of the overviews uses those, not the Gemini token.

Sources

Eligibility, fan-out, controls and reporting: Google Search Central, AI features. Google-Extended: Google Search Central, common crawlers.