How To Rank In AI Overviews In The New Age Of SEO
![An illustration of a Google AI Overview showing results from a search for the keyword AI Overview with the Google logo in the background]](https://ik.imagekit.io/8millionstories/blog/2025/how-to-rank-in-ai-overviews-in-the-new-age-of-seo/hero.png?updatedAt=1752155547083&tr=ar-545-251,fo-center,w-545,dpr-auto,lo-true,q-100){kind=icon}
As Generative AI tools, also known as Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT evolve, Google has had to make some changes to try and secure its place as the world's top search platform.
In a bid to compete with the convenience AI chat bots offer Google has revolutionised its search interface. In May 2024 the company officially launched AI Overviews (AIOs) in the US, expanding to the UK and other countries in August 2024, with a global rollout in October 2024. Unlike the traditional search we've known for over a decade, Google now often provides users with direct answers to their query at the top of the search results via AI Overviews (for eligible queries and users), while still including traditional organic listings below.
Building on this Google also launched AI Mode in the US in May 2025, which offers a more interactive, chatbot-like search experience, enabling follow-up questions and more exploratory conversations directly within the search interface.
So, how do you get your website to rank in AI Overviews? While this section of the search engine results page (SERP) is still evolving, the past several months have provided some clues. Let's dive in!
E-E-A-T & Quality Content is Still Crucial
The content produced on your website should still follow Google's E-E-A-T guidelines. In fact, with AIOs preferring authoritative sources in many cases, this is arguably more important than ever.
What is E-E-A-T in SEO?
E-E-A-T is a set of factors included in Google's Quality Rater Guidelines, that your content should incorporate to signal that it's of high quality to Google. The acronym stands for:
Expertise – Demonstrating your subject matter expertise through the depth and accuracy of your content.
Experience – Showing that your content is created with first-hand experience of the topic.
Authority – Building your brand's authority by consistently publishing high-quality content around core topics related to your business and its product.
Trustworthiness – Being transparent about who is behind your content and publish accurate information.
There are several ways to highlight this aspect within your content, such as:
- Implementing schema markup & structured data: For example, Organisation Schema to provide details about who your organisation is or News Article Schema to provide background context on articles. Both Structured Data and Schema are proving to be critical for LLMs and AIOs. By adding this layer of context to your content, you make it significantly easier for AI to understand key information. This clarity aids LLMs in extracting facts, understanding relationships, and providing definitive, concise answers directly within AI Overviews. Think of it as giving the AI a meticulously organised data sheet, rather than just a narrative, helping it to confidently answer complex queries.
- Including author details & bios: Make sure you also include the author’s name and title in published content. Google favours content when it knows who wrote it and that the person is an expert, which also builds trust.
- Have an about us page, mission, why – or all three: This is great for building trust from a consumer perspective alone but can also be great for letting Google know more about your brand and in the age of AI Search, controlling the narrative about your 'who' and 'why' is more important than ever!
- Linking to and receiving links from other trusted websites: While backlinks should never be used unnecessarily, receiving links to your site from other trusted sources and linking to them helps signal to Google that your site is credible.
- Using defined topic clusters and pillars on your website: As search engines crawl your website they know exactly what your brand is about and the topics you regularly publish content on. Sticking to set content pillars will help to enhance Google's perceived expertise of your site on those core subjects, allowing you to rank better.
Structure is Key When It Comes to AIOs
AI Search Tools love chunks of content e.g., concise, simple, yet complete paragraphs and sentences that contain the full answer to a query.
For example, if a user were to search for:,
"What's the best way to dry a cotton shirt quickly?"
Your page would be more likely to rank in the AIO with a concise answer, such as:
"The best method to quickly dry a cotton shirt is to tumble dry it on a low or medium setting.""It's best to dry your cotton clothes inside out to prevent damage to the fabric and colour fading.""It's best to air dry your cotton clothes where possible to maintain the integrity of the fabric."
This isn't to say that all content should be created in short sharp sentences. Paragraphs containing these work great too, but the idea is to summarise key points concisely within a snippet of text that AIOs and AI Search Tools can use to directly answer the searcher's query. Due to this, AI Overviews currently favour several types of content and structures. We'll cover these in the following section.
The Types of Content Ranking in AI Overviews
While results will differ depending on your specific industry and the query searched, there are some types of content that AI Overviews and AI Search Tools definitely favour, and this is because they prefer certain structures. When it comes to AI Overviews, bullet points, lists and summaries tend to be cited often, as these offer answers structured in the way we discussed in the previous section. This means that when it comes to ranking in AIOs the following content types are often cited:
- Guides & How-Tos – Currently, guides appear to be a favoured content type that rank well within AIOs. Not only does a guide usually signal something that's comprehensive, but they also typically offer expertise. At the moment, this appears to be a trend across industries. How-tos are also popular, often offering step-by-step points that are easy for the AI to follow and pull into its answers.
- Listicles – Listicle style content breaks down key areas by headings and provides concise answers within short paragraphs under each. The structure is easy for LLMs to 'read' and extract from resulting in this style of writing being strongly favoured within AI Overview citations and other AI Search Tools. This is another trend that's typically true across industries.
- FAQs – Frequently Asked Questions have always been important for ranking in Search. However, arguably in the new age of AI, they are even more crucial as they offer clear and concise answers for AI Search Tools to utilise, being referenced within AI Overviews often.
- Comparisons & Versus Style Articles – This style of content may be industry-specific but when it comes to hotels, resorts and travel, AIOs are ranking content that compares and contrasts. This often allows the AIO to offer a balanced and nuanced opinion to searchers when highlighting the pros and cons of certain destinations or accommodation.
- Itineraries & Things To Do – Another travel-industry trend is itineraries and things to do style content. Google's AIOs often try to help travellers by providing answers from these on what to do, see and how long to stay in a destination.
AI Overview's Query Fan-Out Technique
What's more, Google's AI Overviews are fanning out user's search queries to provide an answer from various angles. For example, a search for:
"How long should my puppy sleep during the day?"
Would be broken down by the AI to become:
"How much sleep does a newborn puppy need?"
"How much sleep does a 3-8 week puppy need?"
"How much sleep do puppies older than 2 months need?"
"How to calm a puppy down?"
And even more queries, before the AIO collates the information to form its answer. Gemini will tell you this itself if you ask it nicely:
Hence, when creating content on a topic or to answer a broader query, consider what other angles you might be able to answer the question from and incorporate this into the copy.
Recency is Also Important for Ranking in AIOs
Good data is timely, and Google's AI Overviews aim to provide correct answers to users, which is why in most cases AIOs tend to choose sources that are the most up to date. This means creating new content and refreshing old top performers is crucial. Be sure to check your site's pages and past content for any that contain previous years in the headings and page titles. When refreshing content, adapt or add to the information enough that the article can be considered a new version, as changing the publication date on content without significant changes is frowned upon by Google.
Don't Forget Video Content
Video content can also be referenced by many AI Search Tools. As Google likes to incorporate information from its own platforms, we've seen that AI Overviews can often cite or contain YouTube videos. Therefore, it's important not to forget about your video content and to also apply SEO to your video titles and descriptions by including keywords in the copy.
Technical SEO Still Plays a Role
Just like traditional search, your website needs to be technically sound in order to rank. While AI Overviews rely on generative AI to form responses, they are still based on data indexed via traditional crawling methods like Googlebot. Therefore, ensuring your site is crawlable and indexable remains essential. For example, content heavily reliant on JavaScript or hidden behind authentication may be harder for LLMs to process, reducing visibility in AI Search. While PDFs can be crawled, HTML content is more accessible and therefore more likely to be referenced. Ensuring fast-loading times across your webpages can also be helpful. Not only does it offer a better user experience overall but AIOs prioritise providing searchers with a quick answer, meaning the faster they can gain the information from your site – the better!
New Standards to Consider: such as LLMS.txt
As the LLMs that underpin AI models become more central to search, new technical considerations emerge, such as LLMS.txt. Similar to how robots.txt guides search engine crawlers, LLMS.txt is being discussed as a potential way to provide instructions for Large Language Models. This file could allow webmasters to specify how LLMs should interact with their content, potentially guiding the data LLMs consume, how information is attributed, or even asserting limitations. However, it's important to note that this is an emerging technique and widespread support from major players like Google is not yet fully established. While we recommend considering its potential for managing your digital footprint in the age of AI Overviews, be wary that it might not be universally adopted, and its impact is still evolving. Implementing and correctly configuring LLMS.txt could be vital for influencing how AI search tools interpret and present your site's information, but its role will solidify as the industry matures.
There you have it, our SEO guide to ranking in Google's AI Overviews. While no single action alone will guarantee your website will be cited, incorporating these aspects can increase your chances. If you'd like to improve your rankings with AI Overviews or are seeing an increase in impressions while clicks decline, get in touch to discuss an AI audit for your website today!
