How to Rank in AI Overviews
AI Overviews cite pages that are already trusted and easy to quote. Authority decides whether you are a candidate; structure decides whether you are the one quoted. Both halves are required - neither substitutes for the other.
What decides whether an AI Overview cites you?
Six things working together: topical authority, E-E-A-T signals, how comprehensively the page covers the subject, how clearly it is structured, page-level trust, and site-level authority. Formatting improves your odds among candidates; authority is what makes you a candidate.
This is why the answer to 'how do I optimise for AI search' is less exotic than it sounds. The systems selecting citations are drawing on the same signals of quality and trust that ranking has always used, applied to passages rather than pages.
The genuinely new part is extraction. A page can rank well and still never be cited, because its answer is spread across four paragraphs and three subheadings and cannot be lifted out intact.
How do you make a page quotable?
Put a direct answer immediately under a heading phrased as the question, keep that answer self-contained so it makes sense removed from the page, and follow it with the depth that earns the ranking.
- 1Phrase headings as the questions people ask, not as noun-phrase labels.
- 2Answer in the first one or two sentences under the heading, before any preamble.
- 3Make each answer stand alone - no 'as mentioned above', no pronouns pointing at earlier paragraphs.
- 4Put specifics in the answer: numbers, thresholds, named things. Vague passages are not quoted because they do not resolve anything.
- 5Add accurate structured data so the page's role and content are unambiguous.
- 6Keep the depth. Answer-only pages get quoted once and outranked permanently.
Does this conflict with ranking in normal search?
No. Answer-first structure improves featured snippet capture and click-through in classic results as well. The formatting that makes a passage quotable is the formatting that makes a page easy to read.
The one real tension is traffic. A well-cited answer can satisfy the searcher without a click. The defensible response is to answer the question honestly and make the page the place where the next question is answered too - which is a reason to keep depth rather than to withhold the answer.
Withholding the answer to force a click is a strategy with a short life. It loses the snippet, loses the citation, and increasingly loses the ranking as engagement signals reflect the frustration.
Frequently asked questions
Is generative engine optimisation a separate discipline?
Not really. It is the same authority and relevance work, plus a formatting discipline focused on making passages extractable. Sites doing SEO well already have most of it.
Can I stop AI systems from quoting my content?
You can restrict some crawlers through robots.txt, at the cost of visibility in those surfaces. For most commercial sites the citation is worth more than the withheld click.
Does structured data help with AI citation?
It helps by removing ambiguity about what the page is and what it claims. It does not substitute for authority, and inaccurate markup is worse than none.