AI Overviews Eligibility: The Checklist Google Gives

There is no way to guarantee a place in Google’s AI Overviews or AI Mode, and Google says so. But there is a short, official list of what makes a page eligible, and a surprising number of sites fail it without knowing. This post turns Google’s requirements into a checklist you can run on your own pages, and then covers the settings that can block a page by accident.

What Google requires, in one sentence

Google’s page on AI features and your website puts it plainly: to be eligible 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”, meeting the Search technical requirements. It adds: “There are no additional technical requirements.”

Google’s newer guide to generative AI search adds one more condition at site level: the site must be included in the Search generative AI features setting in Search Console. That setting is on by default.

So eligibility comes down to four things: the page is indexed, a snippet is allowed, the page meets the basic technical requirements, and the site has not opted out. Everything after that is about quality and relevance, which no checklist can promise.

The checklist

1. The page is indexed. In Search Console, paste the URL into the URL Inspection tool. It should say the URL is on Google. If not, the report tells you why, for example “Excluded by noindex tag” or “Crawled, currently not indexed”. Fix the reason first, then use Request indexing in the same tool to ask Google to crawl the page again.
2. Googlebot can reach it. Google’s technical requirements are short: Googlebot isn’t blocked, the page works (returns HTTP 200), and the page has indexable content. Check robots.txt, but also check your firewall and CDN. Google’s AI features page specifically mentions allowing crawling “by any CDN or hosting infrastructure”, not only robots.txt.
3. A snippet is allowed. Look at the page source or the URL Inspection “View crawled page” HTML for a robots meta tag. A nosnippet value, or a very small max-snippet value, limits what Google can show from the page.
4. The important content is text. Google’s list of best practices includes making sure important content is available in textual form. Prices or key facts that only exist inside an image are harder to use.
5. Structured data matches the page. Google asks that structured data match the visible text. Markup describing things that aren’t on the page is a problem in any search feature.
6. The site is included in AI features. In Search Console, open Settings → Search generative AI and check the setting. Google’s help page for the control says the default for all properties is to include the site’s links and content.

Settings that block pages by accident

In support work, the same few causes come up when someone asks why a page never appears anywhere in Google, AI features included:

• A leftover noindex. Sites built on a staging copy sometimes go live with “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” still ticked under Settings → Reading in WordPress. Check it once.
• Noindex on a whole post type or taxonomy. SEO plugins let you set robots meta for entire content types. In Rank Math, these settings live under Titles & Meta for each post type. One wrong toggle can hide every product or every service page.
• A nosnippet added for another reason. Some sites add nosnippet to stop Google showing text from a page, then forget that it also limits AI features. The earlier post on robots.txt, meta robots and X-Robots-Tag explains where these directives can hide, including HTTP headers.
• A firewall that blocks Googlebot. Security plugins and CDNs sometimes challenge or block crawlers. The page looks fine in your browser but Googlebot gets an error. URL Inspection’s live test shows what Googlebot actually receives.
• An old opt-out. Someone may have excluded the site from Search generative AI features months ago. If so, the trade-offs are covered in the earlier post on whether to exclude your site from AI features.

If you want to limit AI features instead

Some site owners want the opposite: to stay in normal Search but limit what AI features show. Google’s AI features page lists the controls: nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet and noindex, plus the site-wide Search generative AI setting. Each has a different reach. For example, data-nosnippet can hide one section of a page while leaving the rest available.

Google’s help page says changes to the Search generative AI setting generally take a few days, and content is usually excluded within one to two days after the control takes effect. Page-level changes depend on recrawling, which Google says can take from several days to several months. Use URL Inspection to request a recrawl of important pages after a change.

How to tell whether it’s working

Appearances in AI Overviews and AI Mode are counted in the normal Performance report under the Web search type, according to Google’s AI features page. For more detail, Search Console’s generative AI report shows impressions in AI features, as covered in the post on what the generative AI report shows.

If a page passes every item on the checklist and still never appears, eligibility is not the problem. The next question is whether the page offers something the AI answer needs, which is where the advice on non-commodity content comes in.