AI Overviews Eligibility Checklist: What Google Actually Documents

Google's AI features page for site owners (last updated 10 December 2025) sets one bar: a page "must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet, fulfilling the Search technical requirements. There are no additional technical requirements." The same page says there are no "special optimizations necessary" for AI Overviews or AI Mode.

That makes this checklist short. Every item below is a way to fail Google's existing Search requirements. None is a way to score extra points. Our digest of Google's AI features documentation covers the full page.

What Google does not document is just as useful:

• How it picks which eligible pages appear in a given overview.
• Which exact model version runs AI Overviews. Google publishes only "Gemini 3" as of October 2026.
• Any position or rank data inside an overview.

Also keep in mind that AI Overviews often don't trigger at all. A query with no overview tells you nothing about your page.

Start with the gate everything else depends on: can Googlebot fetch the page, and is it in the index?

Robots.txt

There is no robots.txt token that blocks AI Overviews or AI Mode. Google says robots.txt directives for Googlebot are the control, because AI is built into Search. Blocking Googlebot removes you from Search entirely, not just from AI answers.

User-agent: Googlebot
Allow: /

Google-Extended is a separate token. Google's crawler documentation says it governs training and grounding for Gemini Apps and Vertex, and that it "does not impact a site's inclusion in Google Search." Blocking it does not remove you from AI Overviews. For the Gemini app, see the Gemini checklist.

Index status

A page Google has dropped cannot be cited. In Otterly's 2026 experiment, two AI-generated sites were deindexed by Google (one after about 14 days) and Google's AI surfaces almost stopped citing them, while Bing-grounded Copilot kept going. Check actual index membership with URL Inspection in Search Console. A crawl can only show eligibility signals.

Server reachability

Robots.txt permission is not the same as getting a 200 response. A firewall or CDN rule can turn away a crawler that robots.txt allows. Confirm your server logs show Googlebot receiving 200s on the pages that matter.

Google's robots meta tag documentation lists the controls that keep content out of snippets, and so out of AI Overviews. They are legitimate tools. The risk is applying them by accident, often through a template someone set up to hide a cookie banner or a staging site.

A stray tag looks like this:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, nosnippet">

Check both the rendered HTML and the HTTP headers, because an X-Robots-Tag header never shows up in a view-source scan. Our playbook for finding accidental noindex tags walks through the search. For data-nosnippet, list every element carrying it and confirm each one was deliberate. If your pricing or product description sits inside one, Google will not quote it.

Google has added a control in Search Console for generative AI features. It covers AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative AI features in Discover, and Google says it expects to update that list.

Three details matter for an audit:

• It is opt-out. Inclusion "is the default control for all properties." You do not need to opt in. See whether you need to opt in to AI Overviews for the detail.
• Child properties inherit. The default for a child property is "Inherit control from parent." A property can be excluded because someone opted out at a parent level.
• Not every owner sees it yet. Google describes it as rolling out to a subset of owners, so a missing toggle is not proof of anything.

This setting is invisible from outside. No crawler or third-party tool can read it. The only way to check is to open Search Console for each property and its parents. Our guide to Google's AI features control shows where it sits. Google says the control isn't used as a ranking signal for other parts of Search.

Two technical limits come up in audits. Both rarely bite on Google.

The 2MB fetch limit

Google's March 2026 crawler post states that Googlebot fetches up to 2MB for any individual URL, excluding PDFs, which get 64MB. Bytes past that point are not fetched, rendered or indexed. The limit is per URL, and sub-resources count separately. Google also says the vast majority of sites will never hit it. Measure raw HTML size and act only on pages that exceed the threshold, typically ones with huge inline data blobs.

JavaScript rendering

Googlebot renders JavaScript, so content that appears only after scripts run can still be indexed by Google. That is not true of most other AI crawlers. If you also care about ChatGPT or Claude, server-render the facts that matter. The ChatGPT visibility checklist covers that side.

Google is direct about this: "Indexing and serving isn't guaranteed." Passing every item makes your page eligible. It does not put it in an overview.

What happens after eligibility is mostly outside your control. Google decides whether an overview triggers, which eligible pages it draws on, and how it phrases the answer. Ahrefs found that 37.9% of URLs cited in AI Overviews also appeared in the first 10 organic results (March 2026), so ranking and citation overlap but are not the same thing. If your page passes and still never shows up, our answer on why indexed pages miss AI Overviews covers the usual reasons.

Things you can skip on Google's own word: llms.txt files, AI-specific markup, chunking and writing "for AI." Google's AI optimization guide says Search ignores AI text files and that you don't need to write in a special way for generative AI search.

Run it in order

1. Confirm robots.txt allows Googlebot and the server returns 200 to it.
2. Confirm the page is indexed in URL Inspection.
3. Check meta robots tags and X-Robots-Tag headers for noindex, nosnippet and max-snippet:0.
4. List every data-nosnippet element and confirm each is intentional.
5. Open the Search Console AI features control for the property and every parent.
6. Flag any URL over 2MB of HTML.

Then check what the overview says once you appear. Eligibility is about access; checking AI Overview accuracy is about whether Google gets your facts right.