Google's AI Features Documentation, Digested: Eligibility for AI Overviews and AI Mode

The source is Google's own Search Central page, "AI Features and Your Website", last updated 10 December 2025 (UTC). It is written for site owners and covers the two generative surfaces inside Google Search: AI Overviews and AI Mode.

It does not cover every Google AI product. Gemini Apps sit under a different control, Google-Extended, which is explained in our digest of Google's common crawlers doc and Google-Extended. The Gemini API's developer-invoked grounding is another separate path.

What this means: when someone says "Google AI", ask which surface. This page only answers for AI Overviews and AI Mode.

This is not a study. Google ran no experiment here and published no data. The page states rules for its own systems.

That makes it the best available evidence for how Google's AI surfaces treat a site, because nobody else can see inside them. It also means the statements are assertions. They can't be tested from outside.

Read it the way you'd read a platform's terms: authoritative on what the gate is, silent on how selection works past the gate. Pair it with Google's generative AI optimization guide, published in July 2026, which extends the same position to llms.txt, chunking and writing style.

Four statements carry the page.

1. Eligibility means indexed plus snippet-eligible

"To be eligible to be shown as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, 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." A supporting link is the cited page shown alongside the AI answer.

2. No special optimization

"There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary." Schema, AI text files and rewritten copy are not on the list.

3. No guarantee

"Indexing and serving isn't guaranteed." Meeting the requirement makes a page a candidate. It doesn't put the page in an answer.

4. Two surfaces, possibly two systems

AI Overviews and AI Mode "may use different models and techniques" and can return different links. AI Overviews also often do not trigger at all for a query.

What this means: Google's AI surfaces inherit classic Search eligibility. If a page can't show a snippet in Search, it can't be a supporting link.

The page defines the gate. Several things that can quietly close it live elsewhere.

• Snippet directives. noindex, nosnippet, max-snippet and data-nosnippet are the documented on-page controls for limiting display in AI features. Templates often carry them by accident, for example a data-nosnippet meant for a cookie banner wrapped around a whole page section.
• robots.txt. There is no robots.txt token that blocks AI Overviews or AI Mode on its own. Google states that robots.txt directives for Googlebot are the control, so blocking Googlebot blocks Search and its AI features together.
• The Search Console generative AI control. Inclusion is opt-out, not opt-in: Google describes it as the default control for all properties, so you don't need to opt in to appear in AI Overviews. But the control covers AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover generative AI, child properties inherit it from the parent by default, and as of October 2026 it has only reached a subset of owners. A property can be excluded with nothing visible from outside. Our page on whether a Search Console setting could be hiding your site covers how to look.

A directive that excludes a page looks like this:

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

The page is clear about the gate and says nothing about selection beyond it.

• How supporting links are chosen. No factors are listed. Ranking is related but not decisive: Ahrefs found that 37.9% of URLs cited in AI Overviews also appeared within the first 10 blocks (March 2026). Ahrefs changed its method between studies, so that figure is a snapshot, not a trend.
• Whether you appeared. Search Console's generative AI report shows impressions only, with no clicks, CTR or position. No tool has ranking ground truth for these surfaces, so any "AI rank" for Google can't be checked against anything.
• Whether markup helps a page enter the set. Google says structured data isn't required for generative AI search. Ahrefs' matched test on already-cited pages found AI Overviews citations fell 4.6% after adding schema. Whether schema helps a page with no citations is untested, not proven either way.

What this means: being eligible and never appearing is a normal outcome, not a bug. Our page on why an indexed page never shows in AI Overviews covers what you can and can't influence.

Everything below is in your control. Run it on the pages that matter most, such as pricing, product and category pages.

1. Confirm the page is indexed. Use URL Inspection in Search Console. If it's not indexed, nothing else matters.
2. Check robots.txt for Googlebot. A disallow for Googlebot removes the page from Search and its AI features at once.
3. Read the robots meta tag and X-Robots-Tag header. Look for noindex, nosnippet or max-snippet:0. Any of them blocks a supporting link.
4. Search the HTML for data-nosnippet. Confirm every instance is intentional and wraps only what you meant to hide.
5. Check the Search Console generative AI control. If your property has the toggle, confirm it isn't set to exclude, and check whether child properties inherit from a parent that is.

Then stop optimizing for the gate. Past it, Google promises nothing, and no markup is documented as helping. For the full list, use the AI Overviews eligibility checklist. To see whether an AI Overview appears for a given query, the AI Overview Checker shows what Google returns.