Knowledge base v2.13.0 · Community edition · data through 2 October 2026
Thing · Feature
AI-generated summaries at the top of Google results, with links to the pages that support them.
Glossary · AI Overviews
AI-generated summaries shown in Google results with links to supporting pages. They are built on Google's core ranking systems and use content indexed by Google Search.
Documented in
The Search generative AI control covers AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative AI features in Discover. Excluding removes both links to the site and use of its content to ground answers.
Google Search Console Help · Day 1 · What's new in the world of Search
Google's AI features guide says a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet to appear as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, with no additional technical requirements.
Google Search Central · Day 2 · Controlling indexing
Google's robots meta tag specification says the nosnippet rule also prevents a page's content from being used as a direct input for AI Overviews and AI Mode, and max-snippet also limits how much of it may be used that way.
Google Search Central · Day 2 · How does the index look like?
Google says query fan-out in AI Overviews and AI Mode issues related searches across subtopics and several data sources, which for AI Mode include the Knowledge Graph and shopping data as well as web content (AI Mode launch post, March 2025).
Google Search Central, Google blog (5 March 2025) · Day 2 · How does the index look like?
Google's Trends FAQ says Google Trends filters out searches made by Google products and services, including the internal searches made by AI Mode and AI Overviews.
Google Trends Help · Day 2 · Google Trends
Google's AI features guide says there are no additional requirements, and no special schema.org structured data, needed to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode; a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown with a snippet.
Google Search Central · Day 3 · How Search results are born
Google's AI features guide says traffic from sites appearing in AI features such as AI Overviews and AI Mode is included in the overall search traffic in Search Console and reported in the Performance report within the Web search type.
Google Search Central · Day 3 · Lightning session L: Understanding SERPs and your users
Google's AI features guide says clicks from search results pages with AI Overviews are higher quality, meaning users are more likely to spend more time on the site.
Google Search Central · Day 3 · Lightning session L: Understanding SERPs and your users
Google's AI features guide says that with AI Overviews people have been visiting a greater diversity of websites for help.
Google Search Central · Day 3 · Mastering the messy middle
Slide and stage claims that name it, the ones Google’s documentation does not cover first.
Google says users like AI Overviews and search more because of them, with early feedback overwhelmingly positive and satisfaction highest among 18–24 year olds.
Google says AI Overviews help with new types of questions and lead users to visit a greater diversity of sites, with more total sites shown on the results page.
Google said it offers users a choice between AI Mode, AI Overviews and traditional search rather than focusing on one experience.
Lino Cattaruzzi · Day 1 · Welcome and opening keynotes
Google said 77% of users of AI Overviews and AI Mode are able to make decisions faster because of them.
Lino Cattaruzzi · Day 1 · Welcome and opening keynotes
Google listed eight ways AI Search helps users find and visit websites: preferred sources expansion, fresh perspectives and prominent links, subscription content, in-line quotes in AI Mode and AI Overviews, rich linking and embedded web, context on content sources, 'Highly Cited' labels and Search profiles.
Sites that users mark as a preferred source are more visible in Top Stories and are labelled in AI Mode and AI Overviews.
AI Overviews and AI Mode launched as fairly text-heavy answers with little image content and few tables, and they have become more structured over time because that is what users want.
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
Google's headline finding was that people who use AI features such as AI Mode or AI Overviews feel much more confident about their purchase decisions.
Google said AI Overviews and AI Mode are integrated into one seamless AI experience in Search.
Lino Cattaruzzi · Day 1 · Welcome and opening keynotes
Google said its AI-powered responses in Search alone, AI Overviews and AI Mode, send more than a billion clicks per week to the web.
Lino Cattaruzzi · Day 1 · Welcome and opening keynotes
Google said a multi-part query, such as a white three-row SUV for two teenagers and a car-sick dog, cannot be satisfied by a list of links because no single article covers every aspect, while AI Overviews and AI Mode can synthesise an answer that helps users decide where to go.
Gary Illyes · Day 1 · What's new in the world of Search
AI Mode and AI Overviews use the same crawling and the same index as Search. At serving they add grounding on the Search index and query fan-out.
AI Overviews and AI Mode may have extra processes of their own, like any other search feature, but the bulk of their processing is the same as for normal Search.
Gary Illyes · Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?
John Mueller said Google uses the snippet as a way of building AI Overviews and AI Mode answers, so if a page forbids a snippet, Google cannot use that snippet for them.
John Mueller · Day 2 · Controlling indexing
AI Overviews and AI Mode are built on top of Search results: they are a different experience of the same content Google already has.
Erin Sparling · Day 2 · Lightning session D: Rendering and JavaScript
AI Overviews and AI Mode typically do not ground their answers by reading pages live, unlike Gemini when a user asks about a specific page, Google said.
Erin Sparling · Day 2 · Lightning session D: Rendering and JavaScript
The structured data Google processes is not fed very differently to AI Overviews and AI Mode: after cleaning and quality work, the same data goes to both the classic results page and the AI features.
Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.
AI Overviews and AI Mode use the same index structures and token-based snippets as classic web results, a point Google called important but not obvious.
Google said that when AI Overviews or AI Mode run a query fan-out, the generated queries are sent to Google's Search index and documents come back with their snippets, which then feed the AI-generated answer (part of this passage is unclear in the recording).
Google's generative AI features in Search build on the traditional ways of searching, so query understanding also flows into AI Overviews and AI Mode.
John Mueller · Day 3 · Making sense of users' queries
Google said that if AI Mode one day showcases images, recipes or similar elements, those parts would need structured data, but in their current form AI Mode and AI Overviews require pretty much nothing extra.
Nik Vujic said GA4 setups that separate out traffic from LLMs do not capture visits from AI Overviews and AI Mode.
Nik Vujic · Day 3 · Lightning session L: Understanding SERPs and your users
AI Overviews and AI Mode are built on the Search infrastructure Google has used for 25 to 30 years and have very few processes of their own.
Gary Illyes · Day 3 · Wrapping all up: AI, Search, and making sense of everything.
Search Console has a property setting called Search generative AI that gives direct control over AI Overviews and AI Mode without affecting web rankings. Its states are inherit from parent, include and exclude.
AI Overviews and AI Mode work together: a user can start with an AI Overview and continue the conversation in AI Mode.
Gary Illyes · Day 1 · What's new in the world of Search
The nosnippet rule also prevents a page's content from being used as a direct input for AI Overviews and AI Mode in Search.
John Mueller · Day 2 · Controlling indexing
John Mueller said, hedging with 'I think', that the max-snippet limit also applies to AI Overviews and AI Mode.
John Mueller · Day 2 · Controlling indexing
Setting the Search generative AI control in Search Console to exclude keeps a site's links and content out of Search generative AI features such as AI Overviews and AI Mode, so the site gets no traffic or impressions from them; include is the default.
John Mueller · Day 2 · Controlling indexing
Sites need no extra work to appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode: both work on top of the existing web results, so what works for web results also works for the AI features.
AI Mode and AI Overviews are not rich results but standard search features: they need no structured data to function and work with the normal text results from Google's index.
Google framed AI Mode and AI Overviews as combining the trust and real-world information of Google Search with the conversational power of an AI chatbot.
Lino Cattaruzzi · Day 1 · Welcome and opening keynotes
The keynote's '2.5 billion people worldwide' named no feature, but Google's I/O 2026 keynote (May 2026) gives exactly that figure as AI Overviews' monthly active users, so cite it as AI Overviews monthly users, not as users of all AI features.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 1 · Welcome and opening keynotes
nofollow is a link-graph hint for search engines, not an access control: to keep AI crawlers away from content, use robots.txt rules for the specific crawlers; at Google, Google-Extended covers Gemini training and grounding, and the Search generative AI control covers AI Overviews and AI Mode.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 2 · Controlling indexing
Before adding nosnippet or a low max-snippet value, weigh the cost in AI features: both limit how much of the page AI Overviews and AI Mode can use, and John Mueller described those answers as built from snippets.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 2 · Controlling indexing
Check AI Overviews and AI Mode with native-language queries in each target market, not with translated English keywords, and compare with the country breakdown of Search Console's generative AI performance report; topics where competitors are cited and you are not point to missing or weak local content.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 2 · Focusing on Internationalisation and Localisation
There is no separate AI index to optimise for: when a page never shows up as a source in AI Overviews or AI Mode, first check that it is indexed, that no nosnippet rule blocks its snippet and that the site is not excluded in Search Console's generative AI setting, the eligibility conditions Google lists.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 2 · How does the index look like?
Treat nosnippet, data-nosnippet and max-snippet as AI visibility settings too: Google lists them as the controls for content in AI features, and if AI answers are built from index snippets, as Google said on stage, a blocked or shortened snippet leaves AI Overviews and AI Mode less to use.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 2 · How does the index look like?
No Google documentation states that fan-out queries stay out of Search Console, but the docs fit the stage statement: the Performance report counts AI Overviews and AI Mode under the user's own queries, and the Generative AI reports have no query dimension.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 3 · Making sense of users' queries
Day 2 said the structured data Google processes also feeds AI Overviews and AI Mode (D2-C476), while Day 3 said these features do not need structured data to function: markup is not a condition for appearing in AI features, but data taken from it can still reach them.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 3 · How Search results are born
Search Console's generative AI performance reports count impressions only, with no clicks and no query dimension (Google documents the Search report for AI Overviews and AI Mode, plus a separate Discover report), so measure visits that follow AI answers with your own analytics.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 3 · Inside Search Console: What’s New & How to Use It
Kit items about AI Overviews: their own words name it, or several of the claims they rest on do.
Keep pages indexable and snippet-eligible, the whole technical requirement for AI features
Rests on 5 claims, 4 of them naming AI Overviews; its own words name AI Overviews
Spend no effort on llms.txt, AI text files or AI-specific markup for Google
Rests on 15 claims, 4 of them naming AI Overviews; its own words name AI Overviews
Do not add nosnippet or a short max-snippet unless you accept losing snippets and AI feature use
Rests on 6 claims, 4 of them naming AI Overviews; its own words name AI Overviews
Rests on 6 claims, 3 of them naming AI Overviews; its own words name AI Overviews
Track AI feature visibility in the Generative AI performance report
Rests on 11 claims, 3 of them naming AI Overviews; its own words name AI Overviews
Rests on 2 claims, 1 of them naming AI Overviews; its own words name AI Overviews
Also instory angle A-001glossary terms Search generative AI control, AI Overviews, Grounding, max-snippet, nosnippet and data-nosnippet, Rich results, Search features
AI Mode and AI Overviews use the same crawling and the same index as Search. At serving they add grounding on the Search index and query fan-out.
AI Mode and AI Overviews use the same crawling and the same index as Search. At serving they add grounding on the Search index and query fan-out.
Google said that when AI Overviews or AI Mode run a query fan-out, the generated queries are sent to Google's Search index and documents come back with their snippets, which then feed the AI-generated answer (part of this passage is unclear in the recording).
Google says query fan-out in AI Overviews and AI Mode issues related searches across subtopics and several data sources, which for AI Mode include the Knowledge Graph and shopping data as well as web content (AI Mode launch post, March 2025).
John Mueller said Google uses the snippet as a way of building AI Overviews and AI Mode answers, so if a page forbids a snippet, Google cannot use that snippet for them.
AI Overviews and AI Mode use the same index structures and token-based snippets as classic web results, a point Google called important but not obvious.
Google said that when AI Overviews or AI Mode run a query fan-out, the generated queries are sent to Google's Search index and documents come back with their snippets, which then feed the AI-generated answer (part of this passage is unclear in the recording).
The Search generative AI control covers AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative AI features in Discover. Excluding removes both links to the site and use of its content to ground answers.
Setting the Search generative AI control in Search Console to exclude keeps a site's links and content out of Search generative AI features such as AI Overviews and AI Mode, so the site gets no traffic or impressions from them; include is the default.
Search Console's generative AI performance reports count impressions only, with no clicks and no query dimension (Google documents the Search report for AI Overviews and AI Mode, plus a separate Discover report), so measure visits that follow AI answers with your own analytics.
Google's AI features guide says traffic from sites appearing in AI features such as AI Overviews and AI Mode is included in the overall search traffic in Search Console and reported in the Performance report within the Web search type.
Things named in the same claim, with the number of claims they share.