If you’ve been on LinkedIn recently, you’ve probably seen this meme, with good SEO and GEO best practices held up as the same picture.
Underneath the joke (and the confusion) is a real question every business owner is now asking: how do you show up in AI Overviews? These are the AI-generated answers now sitting at the top of around 60% of Google search results.
The new Google update on optimizing for AI search promises to make the path clearer, but if you’re a business owner without an in-house SEO team, it raises just as many questions as answers, including:
- Is my existing SEO work still doing anything, or do I need to add generative engine optimization (GEO) to my content?
- What does Google actually need me to do that I’m not already doing? Their official guide lists the essentials, but skips the off-page work you’ve heard elsewhere.
- How do I know which advice is best for my business? Every other social media post is selling “GEO services”, which seems to contradict what Google just published.
The problem is, half of the SEO world agrees with the meme, and the other half insists there’s far more to the story.
In this article, we’re going to do what neither camp is doing: explain what the Google guide actually says, where we agree with it (and where we don’t), and give you a usable playbook for triggering AI-powered Overviews to mention your brand.
We use expert views and our own experience getting brands cited as the answer to support this – so you can stop guessing which picture to opt for and start triggering citations.
We’ll cover:
- Understanding the AI Overview shift
- What Google’s new guide says (and where it falls short)
- How to show up in AI Overviews with SEO 2.0
- Go from ranking on Google to being the answer Google gives with Mint Position
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Wondering how to show up in AI Overviews? Book a no-cost consultation with the Mint Position team, and we’ll show you how we’re getting brands into AI-generated answers.
Understanding the AI Overview shift
Love them or hate them, Google’s AI overviews (AIO) now pop up on 60% of their search results pages, more than double that of 2025.
The Growth of AIOs
Source: SE Ranking
The average AIO is also bigger now: quite literally, standing at 1,200 pixels tall. Sitting right at the top of search results, this is enough to push more organic results under the fold than ever.
Yet the deeper story is what’s happening inside these overviews. The Gemini 3 rollout has replaced almost half of the previously cited domains, and AIOs now pull in a third more sources per response.
In short, we’re seeing a big change in who gets cited, even for brands that didn’t change a thing on their end.
So, what does this mean for your business? Well, on searches where an AIO triggers, clicks to the top organic result drop by 58%, and that figure was 34.5% just ten months ago, according to Tim Soulo, CMO at Ahrefs. And that trend appears to be accelerating, fundamentally changing SEO in the process.
Google’s first position used to be your goal: now it’s to appear inside the answer sitting above it.
Note that there is one caveat to all this: it applies almost entirely to informational searches. Some 99.9% of AIO-triggering queries are informational, according to the above research, while shopping searches see them just 3.2% of the time.
If your buyers type informational queries, AIOs matter enormously. If their search has more commercial intent like “buy [product]”, then less so.
What Google’s new guide says (and where it falls short)
On May 15, 2026, the first official Google guidance on optimizing for AI search appeared online.
First, we should note a key point. Google’s guide is about ranking for all generative AI search, including ChatGPT and Claude, as well as its own Gemini and AIOs.
We’re focusing specifically on triggering AI Overviews in this article, so we’ll be filtering through a narrower lens.
That narrow lens matters more than you’d think: for the same query, Google’s AI Mode and AI Overviews reach similar conclusions 86% of the time, even if their citations overlap by just 13.7%, according to Soulo’s research. They might give the same answers, but the sources they use for them are normally different.
In other words, optimizing specifically for AI Overviews is a distinct discipline, and the one with the clearest, most actionable signals for content creators today.
Besides, who better to tell you how to win on Google than Google?
The guide lists clear content prerequisites that apply to AIOs, including:
- Foundational SEO, so making sure content is indexable, snippet-eligible, and technically sound
- Unique and first-hand points of view, these (as ever) beat generic summary content
- Images, video, and business data that expand your surface area inside AIOs
- Structured data, including standard schema markup.
If all this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s smart SEO hygiene that top-ranking brands have been using for years.
The guide also lists what it says you don’t need to appear in AI search results. Some of these may surprise you.
- AI-specific llms.txt files
- Content “chunking”, or breaking pages into bite-sized pieces for easier AI extraction
- AI-specific schema
- Rewriting your site for machines, with Google saying its AI can handle synonyms and conversational phrasing.
Here’s where it gets interesting. A few of these “don’t need” items are worth a second look, because not needing something doesn’t mean it’s useless.
“Google says you don’t need llms.txt or special AI markup. That’s true – as a prerequisite. But ‘not needed’ isn’t the same as ‘not helpful,'” says Justin Calderón, founder of Mint Position. “It’s like XML sitemaps. Google doesn’t strictly need one, but no serious SEO skips them.”
This isn’t something new, either. Google hasn’t always been explicit about gameable signals in the past.
“Google has a long, well-documented history of nudging the industry in directions that benefit Google first and the open web maybe,” says Mike King, founder and CEO of iPullRank, a New York-based SEO and content strategy agency.
That’s not to say the Google guide is wrong – far from it. But it probably isn’t giving us the full picture or, at least, the most strategically useful one.
“Google has forever been in a constant battle with the website owners and content creators it relies on to evolve its search algorithm so that it can’t be gamed,” says Eric Doty, Head of Marketing at Dock, a revenue enablement platform. “Some signals are only useful to Google if the rest of us are not intentionally optimizing for them.”
So, what does this strategic picture look like? At Mint Position, we call it SEO 2.0, and the next section covers how you can use it to trigger your next AI Overview.
How to Show Up in AI Overviews With SEO 2.0
Let’s start with the good news.
The strategies to appear in AI overviews are more layered than traditional SEO, but they’re not mysterious — once you accept that ranking on Google (the goal of SEO) is now just step one.
Without this, you won’t be the answer that AI Overviews turn to (AEO) or get cited by AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude (GEO).
Together, they cover the full picture of what it takes today.
The three layers of SEO 2.0
1. Traditional SEO
This first layer is everything we’ve just walked through: the SEO prerequisites (crawlable links, technical SEO, people-first, bottom-of-the-funnel content, etc.) that have always been important.
Get these wrong and nothing else matters – you simply won’t appear in AIOs.
2. GEO
Here’s where we start to move toward getting cited by AI. Google’s guide doesn’t mention this, but the strongest signal toward showing up in an AI Overview actually isn’t on your page, but on other sites.
Ahrefs’ study of 75,000 brands found a stunning 66% correlation between brand mentions and AIO appearances, three times stronger than that of backlinks (22%). “Citations are the new backlinks,” as Ahrefs CMO Tim Soulo put it.
How Brand Mentions Top the AIO Correlation Study
This forms the spine of our GEO pillar, along with work that gets you mentioned across the web, including expert contributions and digital PR, like guest posting and traditional press releases.
These feed both AIOs and other AI tools at the same time – both types of search engines may use different retrieval systems, but they’re looking for the same thing: brands that the web takes seriously.
“Digital PR and guest posting — what we call earned content — has become much more important,” says Justin. “Backlinks aren’t dead. They just have a louder cousin now.”
There’s an important thing to point out here. Google warns about using “inauthentic mentions”, or buying them from cheap directories. This flags the spam systems of every major AI platform, which definitely won’t result in a mention, as the snippet below states.
3. AEO
For each AIO, Google pulls from a network of related sub-queries and builds the response from web pages covering the whole topic cluster.
They call this the “Query fan-out” and content that makes it into this fan is 161% more likely to be cited than pages that only rank for the initial search term, according to search experts SurferSEO.
How “Fan-Out” Content Is Much More Likely to Feature in AIOs
Source: SurferSEO
SEO 2.0’s AEO layer is triggered by query fanouts — related sub-questions Google generates from a single search — meaning your content needs to answer not just the primary keyword but the cluster of questions surrounding it. Structuring content with FAQ sections that mirror these related queries, ensuring to target multiple secondary keywords, and writing headings that match how buyers actually search, gives AI engines the verbatim lift points they need to include your page in an Overview.
This is also where “chunking” comes into play, even if Google says you don’t have to. Content that’s broken down into bite-sized, direct answers (bullet points can help) gives Gemini cleaner material to lift. It’s not rewriting for machines, but simply writing more clearly.
Practitioners running their own tests are seeing the same pattern.
“My team tested both formats on the same topics after the May 2026 AI optimization guide came out. The short answers get 15% more AIO visibility,” says Charles Noble, founder of Hetneo, who has spent 17 years in SEO and link building.
“I pick one specific query, answer it directly in the first 50 words with a clear verdict, then put a verifiable data point or named source behind it. Google’s AIO generator lifts those tightly scoped answers over broader content every time.”
Charles’s citation rate moved from 1 in 20 queries to 1 in 8 after the shift, even though Google’s official guidance still pushes comprehensive content.
The common thread
There’s one high-quality thread that connects these three stages – something Eric Doty handily refers to as “non-commodity content”. This refers to the lived experiences that AI can’t regurgitate, including:
- Original research
- Proprietary data, including visuals like charts and graphs
- First-hand expertise and points of view.
Both Google and AI engines have always favored this type of authoritative content, part of what we call Journalistic SEO, because they’re both designed to favor reliable sources – and reliability comes from a real person with real expertise behind the words.
Structured data plays a role here, too. An AI-specific schema may not be necessary, as Google says. The Ahrefs study found that, in AIOs, the metric even dipped by 4.6% after implementing AI schemas.
Still, standard schemas like Article and Author markup are worth keeping, as they help AI systems connect your content to verified entities, authors, and publication dates.
Go from ranking on Google to being the answer Google gives with Mint Position
There’s now an uncomfortable truth about ranking first on Google: most of your target audience won’t click on your blue link anymore.
You will, however, stand a good chance of appearing in the AI Overview above you, especially if you follow the SEO 2.0 playbook we’ve laid out above.
“The companies that treat GEO as a bolt-on will keep chasing,” says Justin Calderón. “The ones that built it into their SEO from the start? They’re already there.”
That’s the work Mint Position has been doing with companies for years, long before Google confirmed what we already knew in their recent update. That is, showing up in AI search is still built on SEO – it just doesn’t end there.
With our SEO 2.0 approach, our partners are already showing up in the AI Overviews that their competitors are trying to crack.
In our own category, Mint Position earns more citations per AI response than any of the best SEO agencies we track.
This is because the foundations we’ve always built on, including expert-led content and journalistic SEO, happen to be exactly what AI search rewards.
The brands that learn how to show up in AI Overviews now will own the answer for years. The rest will keep chasing the click.
Ready to see how you can get more customers from AI search? Get in touch with us, and we’ll show you how to grow your visibility in AIOs and LLMs.
FAQs
Do I need an llms.txt file for Google AI Overviews?
If you’re trying to work out how to appear in AI overviews, you’ll see that Google’s new guide says that llms.txt isn’t a must-have. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t help large language models parse your site faster and understand your business better.
Like XML sitemaps, it’s not a ranking signal, but it’s a quick and smart move for any business serious about AI SEO strategy.
Is AI Overview optimization different from traditional ranking SEO?
Judging from our work over the past four years, we’ve seen there’s a significant overlap between traditional SEO (clean technical SEO, backlink building, authoritative content) and AIO. But we estimate around a third of the work to be new, which is what we target within SEO 2.0 – the brand mentions, query fan-out coverage, and content structured to be lifted into AI-generated summaries.
How do I measure AI Overview’s rank tracking?
This should only take you a few minutes. Go to Google Search Console’s AI Mode filter and add a ten-word (or more) regex to bring up informational queries triggering AIOs. Let’s say you’re a BNPL fintech brand. This could be “How does buy now pay later affect my credit score?” Next, add a custom GA4 channel for AI referral traffic, and you’ll then be able to see how much traffic Gemini, ChatGPT, and Perplexity are actually sending you
Tools like Otterly.ai or SE Ranking give you deeper metrics, including share of voice and citation tracking across AI systems. These start at around $25/month.
Will AI Overviews kill my organic traffic?
We’ve seen that click-through rates drop by up to 61% when AIOs trigger, which leads to many zero-click searches. Yet brands cited inside AI-generated answers capture more clicks than uncited competitors, and AI-driven referral traffic typically converts at higher rates than organic search.
How long until I see results from optimizing for AI Overviews?
It all depends on the type of optimization:
- Structural changes (quick answers, FAQ sections, internal links, headings rewritten for AI search) can show up in GSC within a few weeks.
- The off-page layer (brand mentions, topical depth, digital PR) typically takes up to six months.
The brands winning AIOs today started this work 12 to 18 months ago.
Also worth knowing: AIOs are volatile, changing on average every 2.15 days, with around 70% of the wording and sources shifting between versions, according to the Ahrefs study. Don’t panic if you drop out of one: consistent presence over weeks matters more than any single snapshot.
