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Why isn’t my site cited in Google AI Overviews?
Google builds AI Overviews from pages that already rank for the question and the sub-questions it breaks the query into, so a page outside the top results isn’t eligible. Beyond ranking, the passage has to answer directly and stand alone, and the business behind it has to be a consistent entity. There is no AI Overview submission or special markup.
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What Google itself says
Google’s documentation on AI features says there is nothing special to do: the same technical requirements and content guidelines as Search apply, and no additional markup makes a page eligible. AI Overviews and AI Mode cite pages drawn from Google’s ranking systems, so ranking is the gate.
Rank for the sub-questions, not just the keyword
Google has described AI Overviews breaking a query into sub-questions and searching for each. “Best dermatologist in Bangalore” becomes questions about qualifications, treatments, cost and location. A page that answers two of those clearly can be cited for the whole query even when it doesn’t rank first for the main phrase.
Make the passage liftable
The cited passage is usually a self-contained paragraph or list directly under a heading that mirrors the question. Definitions get paragraphs, processes get numbered steps, comparisons get tables. A passage that depends on the paragraph above it to make sense isn’t lifted.
What doesn’t help
FAQ schema no longer produces rich results for most sites, so adding it for stars is wasted effort — though the structure still helps engines parse question-and-answer pairs. Blocking Google-Extended changes nothing here: it controls Gemini training, not Search, and AI Overviews use Googlebot. Buying links to force ranking violates Google’s spam policies.
Sources
See what AI says about you right now
The free audit runs the prompts for your category across every engine and shows, screenshot by screenshot, who gets cited — and the three things to fix first.