How We’re Laying the Groundwork for AI Inclusion

Last Updated: April 21, 2026

Most agency owners are treating AI Overviews like a feature update. It’s not. It’s a fundamental restructuring of how search real estate gets allocated, and who gets left out of it entirely.

Here’s what the data looks like right now:

Between March 13th and 27th, AI Overview presence grew by 528% for entertainment queries, 387% for restaurant queries, and 381% for travel queries. That’s not a gradual rollout; that’s a tectonic shift happening in a two-week window. And it’s not slowing down.

SE Ranking detected AI Overviews in around 30% of tracked U.S. keywords in May 2025. That’s the highest observed share to date.

The screen space implications alone should get your attention…

When AI Overviews and Featured Snippets appear together, they take up approximately 67.1% of the screen on desktop and 75.7% of the screen on mobile. That means even a #1 ranking may not be visible to the person searching.

Even if your clients are ranking #1, the site might not be ranking and functionally invisible.

And the click-through picture is just as stark. CTR falls by roughly 35% when AI summaries appear. Top-ranking pages displaced by AI Overviews can lose up to 79% of their traffic.

But here’s the flip side that most people miss: traffic arriving through AI summaries converts at higher rates and carries stronger intent than clicks from traditional blue links. The people who click through from an AI Overview are already partially sold. They came to verify, not to browse.

So the goal isn’t just to avoid getting crushed by AI Overviews. It’s to get cited in them. There’s a massive difference between being the source Google’s AI pulls from and being the result that gets buried under it.

What Google Actually Says About This

Before we get into what we’re doing to earn inclusion, it’s worth going straight to the source. Google’s official Search Central documentation states:

“The best practices for SEO remain relevant for AI features in Google Search (such as AI Overviews and AI Mode). There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary.”

Read that twice. No special optimizations. The signal set that earns AI Overview inclusion is the same signal set that earns traditional search authority. Google is telling you, directly, that the fundamentals still win.

They go further, explaining how the underlying retrieval works:

“Both AI Overviews and AI Mode may use a ‘query fan-out’ technique — issuing multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources — to develop a response.”

Query fan-out means Google’s AI isn’t just matching your page to a single keyword. It’s pulling from an interconnected web of subtopics. If your content only covers one angle of a topic, you’re invisible to the fan-out.

Your SEO strategy must shift from keywords to thematic authority, including structured content and a clear logical hierarchy that allows the AI to extract and cite your content.

Google also makes clear what it’s looking for in terms of source quality:

“AI Overviews help people get to the gist of a complicated topic or question more quickly, and provide a jumping-off point to explore links to learn more.”

That phrase, “jumping-off point”, is the key. Google’s AI is looking for content it can excerpt cleanly and cite confidently. That means structured, answerable, entity-authoritative content. Not thin pages optimized for a single keyword. Not blog posts written to rank. Content written to be the right answer.

Why This Is Difficult for Most Businesses to Pull Off

Understanding what Google wants is one thing. Actually building the content and signal infrastructure to deliver it is something else entirely.

Here’s where most businesses stall out:

Topical Depth Takes Time

Google’s query fan-out doesn’t just pull from one strong page. It’s looking for sites with comprehensive coverage. The kind of breadth that signals genuine subject matter expertise. Building that kind of topical authority requires a sustained content strategy over months, not a quick sprint.

Entity signals are invisible to most marketers

AI Overviews pull from multiple sources: web content, Google’s Knowledge Graph, and entities (people, places, and things). If your client isn’t built out as a recognized entity in Google’s Knowledge Graph with consistent NAP, brand signals, press mentions, and co-citations, your client doesn’t exist in the AI’s reference model. You can have great content and still get ignored.

Structure is harder than it looks

Long, unstructured text blocks are what the AI avoids. It needs a clear, logical structure. However, most content on the web isn’t structured for AI extraction. It’s structured for humans skimming a blog. That’s a different thing.

E-E-A-T requirements are getting stricter, not looser

Content with no authorship, no citations, and a weak backlink profile may get ignored, even if it technically has the right keywords. For clients in competitive or YMYL-adjacent spaces, the trust bar is high, and most sites aren’t clearing it.

The agencies that figure this out aren’t just winning in AI Overviews. They’re winning everywhere, because the signals that earn inclusion are the same ones that drive rankings, knowledge panels, and brand authority across the board.

Many of the Signals for AI Overviews are the Same Ones We’ve Already Built into Campaigns

When Google’s AI pulls a source into an Overview, it’s not randomly scraping the web. It’s surfacing content from entities it trusts, on topics it’s confident they actually cover, in formats it can cleanly parse and cite.

Sound familiar? It should. That’s been the backbone of our campaigns for years.

FAQ Schema

Structured markup that tells Google, and now AI, exactly what question a piece of content answers. We’ve been implementing for years, because it drives featured snippets, rich results, and knowledge panel signals. AI Overviews pull from the same well.

H-tag optimization

Not just stuffing keywords into headings, actually architecting content so that questions live in H2s and H3s, with answers following immediately underneath. That structure is exactly how AI systems parse and excerpt content for Overviews.

Topical content that answers top questions

We research the actual queries people type, then build content that addresses them directly and completely. No fluff, no padding, just a well-answered question with enough surrounding context to be cited confidently. That’s the content AI Overviews quote.

Brand building and custom signals

Entity authority matters here more than most people realize. When Google’s AI decides who to pull into an Overview, it’s not just looking at backlinks. It’s looking at whether your client exists as a recognized, consistent entity across the web. We’ve been stacking press mentions, NAP consistency, brand search volume, and co-citation signals because they drive knowledge panels and trust. Turns out they drive AI inclusion too.

Press releases with real distribution

Not the “submit to 200 sites” spray-and-pray approach. Actual placement that builds entity associations and topical authority signals in Google’s knowledge graph.

Proven Results in Real World Scenarios

One of our clients showed up in AI Overviews for competitive queries in their space. Not because we did something special for AI. Because the on-page work, the press, the FAQ structure, and the brand signals were already there doing what they were always supposed to do. Basically, all the things we covered above.

The algorithm changed what it serves. But our work was already optimized for what it was looking for.

That’s not luck. That’s what happens when you build for signals that matter, because the signals that earn trust in Google’s traditional systems are the same signals feeding its AI systems.

This isn’t a victory lap. It’s us recognizing a pattern.

The gap between “good SEO” and “AI Overview inclusion” is smaller than most people think. The agencies getting blindsided right now are the ones who were chasing shortcuts like thin content, link velocity, and technical tricks without substance underneath. AI Overviews have zero patience for that.

The agencies whose clients are showing up in Overviews? They were doing the boring, foundational work like entity authority. Topical depth. Structured, answerable content. Trust signals across the web.

That’s what we’ve been doing in managed campaigns. And it’s working.

What’s Coming Next, and Why We’re Confident It Works

We’re not announcing this product because AI Overviews are trending. We’re announcing it because we’ve spent serious time testing the levers that actually move the needle.

The SEO Mad Scientist brand exists for exactly this. It’s where we run real tests, on real sites, across real competitive verticals; not to validate theory, but to find out what actually holds up under pressure. And over the past several months, AIO inclusion has been the lab’s primary focus.

👉 Here’s what the testing has shown us:

Getting cited in AI Overviews isn’t random. There are predictable, repeatable signals that increase a site’s likelihood of inclusion, and they cluster around the same foundational work we described above. Sites with clean topical architecture, structured Q&A content, and strong entity signals outperform sites that rely on keyword density and backlink counts alone. Every time. Across verticals.
The gap between “ranking well” and “getting cited in Overviews” is real, but closeable. We’ve seen pages sitting at position 3 or 4 earn consistent AIO inclusion after targeted structural work. We’ve also seen position 1 pages get completely bypassed because the content wasn’t formatted for extraction. Rank alone doesn’t guarantee you show up. But the right combination of signals does.
FAQ schema is one of the highest-leverage moves on the board. When implemented correctly, it dramatically increases the likelihood that Google’s AI pulls from that page. We’ve tested this across multiple client sites, and the pattern is consistent enough that it’s now a non-negotiable in our process.
Topical authority compounds. Sites that had been building out structured content around a core topic cluster showed measurably higher AIO inclusion rates than sites publishing equivalent page counts without topical coherence. The AI is doing what Google always said it would: rewarding real expertise, not keyword matching.
Brand signals accelerate everything. Entity authority isn’t just a Knowledge Panel play. Press mentions, co-citations, consistent brand presence across authoritative third-party sources; these signals appear to influence whether Google’s AI treats a site as a trustworthy source worth citing. Our clients with active brand-building campaigns have shown up in Overviews faster than comparable sites without that signal layer in place.

The AI product we’re building is designed to operationalize all of this, systematically, for any client, in any vertical.

We’re finalizing the last round of testing before launch. So sign up for updates!

If you’re managing campaigns for clients who need to be in AI Overviews, this is built for you. Keep watching your inbox. When it’s ready, you’ll be the first to know.