Ask Google what a page needs before it can appear in an AI Overview and the answer is almost suspiciously short. The page must be indexed, and it must be eligible to appear in Search with a snippet. That is the entire requirement. No special markup. No AI text file. No hidden switch in Search Console. And yet, of the millions of sites in Google’s index, only a small fraction have ever been cited in an AI-generated answer. The distance between those two facts is where the real work of AI search visibility sits.
The official bar is low
Google’s own documentation, AI features and your website, is unambiguous. There are no additional technical requirements for AI Overviews or AI Mode beyond standard Search eligibility. A page that Googlebot can crawl, index and display with a snippet has, by definition, met the Google AI Overviews eligibility test. Google has also been clear about what a page does not need: no llms.txt file, no AI-specific schema, no machine-readable extras of any kind.
Eligibility, in other words, is the floor. Almost every properly built page already clears it. Which raises the obvious question. If nearly everyone is eligible, why do so few pages get cited?
Eligibility is not citation
Because citation is a competition, and its rules keep moving. Through most of 2025, a citation was largely a proxy for ranking well. Ahrefs analysed 1.9 million AI Overview citations that July and found 76 per cent of cited URLs also sat in Google’s top ten for the same query. When the firm re-ran the study in early 2026, that figure had fallen to 38 per cent. Gemini 3 became the default model behind AI Overviews in January, and with it came a heavier reliance on query fan-out: the system splits a search into a cluster of related sub-queries, retrieves pages that perform well across the wider set, and cites the ones that answer cleanly.
The practical consequence is blunt. A page built to rank for one keyword is playing last year’s game. Working out how to get cited in AI Overviews now means covering a topic across its natural sub-questions, the kind of depth a good SEO agency in Melbourne builds into a content cluster, so the page keeps appearing across the fan-out set.
Placement within the page matters too. A CXL analysis of 100 AI Overview citations found 55 per cent were drawn from the top 30 per cent of the source page. Answers buried beneath long introductions rarely surface. Freshness carries weight as well. Pages left untouched for six months or more steadily lose citation share to newer, better-maintained rivals. The fix is not constant publishing. It is a refresh cadence: revisit the highest-value pages on a schedule, replace ageing statistics, and update the date only when the content has genuinely changed.
Two surfaces, two different games
AI Overviews and AI Mode look like siblings, but they behave like distant cousins. AI Overviews sit above the classic results and only fire when Google decides a summary adds something, which means they often do not appear at all. AI Mode is fully conversational: no organic listings, longer queries, more aggressive fan-out, and a different set of favoured sources. The two may run on related models, but they retrieve differently and cite differently. Citation studies find little overlap between the two surfaces, under 15 per cent by most counts. A page can be a fixture in one and invisible in the other, which is why AI Mode optimisation deserves its own line in a content plan rather than a footnote under SEO.
What quietly disqualifies a page
Most pages that never appear were ruled out before any AI system read a word. A robots.txt rule blocking Googlebot. A stray noindex tag left over from a staging site. Snippet restrictions such as nosnippet or a tight max-snippet setting, which strip out the very text an AI Overview would quote. Content that only renders through JavaScript, which crawlers parse unreliably. And thin answers: pages that gesture at a question without stating a direct, extractable response near the top, the structural failure that Answer Engine Optimisation exists to correct.
None of these problems announce themselves. A site can rank respectably while carrying two or three of them.
The floor and the ceiling
Google has kept the eligibility bar deliberately low, and there is no sign it intends to raise it. The ceiling is another matter. Citation now rewards topical depth, front-loaded answers, current information and clean technical access, measured across two AI surfaces that share surprisingly little. At Myoho Marketing, our Generative Engine Optimisation services in Melbourne start with exactly this split: we confirm eligibility in an afternoon, then do the slower work of earning the citation. Book a free GEO consultation and we will show you where your pages stand on both counts.
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