Google AI Overviews and AI Mode: how to appear and opt out

What Google requires

Google’s answer is short. 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”. Google adds: “There are no additional technical requirements.” Its newer AI optimization guide, last updated on 10 July 2026, adds one condition: the site must be included in Search generative AI features in Search Console, which it is by default (see below).

In practice that means three things:

• Googlebot can crawl the page. Your robots.txt allows it, and so does your CDN or host. Google’s own checklist mentions both.
• The page can be indexed. It returns HTTP 200, has indexable content and no noindex. These are the general Google Search technical requirements.
• The page can be shown with a snippet. No nosnippet, and no max-snippet:0. See the controls below.

None of this guarantees anything. Google says meeting the technical requirements “doesn’t mean that a page will be indexed”, and that AI Overviews “are only shown when our systems determine that it is additive to classic Search”.

Both features may use what Google calls “query fan-out”: running several related searches across subtopics to build one answer. That is why they can link to a wider set of pages than the classic results for the same question.

What Google says you don’t need

Google’s guide to generative AI features answers the usual advice directly. For Google Search, you don’t need:

• New files or markup. “You don’t need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown”. Google names llms.txt as one of the files you can ignore for Google Search. See what llms.txt is and who reads it.
• Special structured data. “There’s no special schema.org markup you need to add.”
• Chunking. “There’s no requirement to break your content into tiny pieces for AI to better understand it.”
• A special writing style. “You don’t need to write in a specific way just for generative AI search.”

Google also says many suggested AEO and GEO “hacks” are not effective, and that “No third-party tool has access to our internal ranking or AI systems”. That includes Citeloop: our audit checks the technical basics from the outside, the same way any crawler sees your site.

What Google does recommend is ordinary site hygiene: allow crawling in robots.txt and at your CDN, link to important pages internally, give users a good page experience, keep important content in text, support it with good images and video, make structured data match the visible text, and keep Merchant Center and Business Profile information up to date.

The controls, and what each one does

These are easy to mix up. Each one does a different job:

Two things follow:

• Blocking Google-Extended does not take you out of AI Overviews or AI Mode. It is a robots.txt token, not a crawler, and it covers other Google products. See AI crawler list: what each bot does and how to block it.
• nosnippet costs you more than AI features. It removes your snippet from every kind of search result. If you only want out of the AI features, the Search Console setting is the narrower tool.

A rule in <meta name="robots"> applies to all crawlers. Google also reads <meta name="googlebot">, which lets you aim a rule at Google’s crawler alone.

How to opt out of AI Overviews and AI Mode

Since 31 August 2026 every site can do this in Search Console:

1. Open the property in Search Console.
2. Go to Settings > Search generative AI.
3. Choose Exclude my site’s links and content from Search generative AI features. The other options are to include the site, or to inherit the setting from a parent property.

A domain property can be the parent of subdomain and URL-prefix properties. By default a property follows its closest parent that has changed the setting, and the owner of the top-level domain property is notified when a child property overrides it.

What happens when you exclude a site, according to Google:

• Links to your site and your content no longer appear in AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative AI features in Discover. Google expects to update this list over time.
• Content crawled from your site is not used as an input to generate an AI response.
• You get no traffic or impressions from these features.
• Content from other sites still appears there, “and it may appear similar to yours”.
• It generally takes a few days. Google says content is excluded within one to two days after the control goes live.

What it does not change:

• It “isn’t used as a ranking or inclusion signal” for the rest of Search.
• It does not affect AI training. Google points to Google-Extended for that.
• To keep a page out of Google Search entirely, you still need noindex.

How to check your own pages

1. robots.txt. Open https://yoursite.com/robots.txt and look for a group that names Googlebot. A group for a named crawler replaces the * group for that crawler, so rules you wrote for everyone may not apply to it. Then check your CDN’s bot settings, because a CDN can block Googlebot whatever robots.txt says.

2. Meta tags and headers. For a page you want in AI Overviews:

curl -sI https://yoursite.com/page/ | grep -i x-robots-tag
curl -s https://yoursite.com/page/ | grep -ioE '<meta[^>]+name="(robots|googlebot)"[^>]*>'

No output from either command means no page-level rule is set. Look for noindex, nosnippet and max-snippet. We ran both on citeloop.ai on 26 October 2026: the guide pages print nothing, while our 404 page prints <meta name="robots" content="noindex">. The second command only sees the HTML your server sends, so check rules added by JavaScript in the next step.

3. URL Inspection in Search Console. It shows “the HTML that Googlebot received while crawling the page”, so you can see the tags Google actually got. After you change a rule, recrawling “can take anywhere from several days to several months”; you can request a recrawl.

4. The Search Console setting. Check that Settings > Search generative AI is not set to exclude, and that the property does not inherit an exclusion from a parent.

How to see whether you appear

Clicks from AI Overviews and AI Mode are counted in Search Console’s Performance report, under the “Web” search type, together with your other search traffic.

Since 31 August 2026 every site also has a Search generative AI performance report. It shows impressions only, not clicks, broken down by page, country, date and device. It may not appear at all if your site has too few impressions in these features or has opted out.

What not to do

Google’s spam policies now cover “attempting to manipulate generative AI responses in Google Search”. Mass-producing pages with AI tools “without adding value for users” is listed under scaled content abuse. The work that holds up is the work above: let Googlebot in, keep pages indexable and snippet-eligible, and publish content worth linking to. See what generative engine optimization is, and what counts as manipulation.

Citeloop’s free GEO audit checks steps 1 and 2 from the outside: whether robots.txt lets Googlebot reach your home page and sampled pages, and whether those pages carry noindex, nosnippet or max-snippet:0 in a robots or googlebot meta tag or an X-Robots-Tag header. It cannot see your Search Console settings.