Short answer: no, and Google has now said so in a sentence plain enough to quote.
The AI features and your website documentation puts it like this: “There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary.”
John Mueller said the same thing informally on Bluesky on 20 August 2026: “from our POV there’s nothing really special you need to do for generative AI responses in search.” I will flag the obvious caveat, because he flagged it himself in the same reply: he said he was not quite sure what the question was asking. On its own that is a throwaway line. It matters because the documentation says the same thing in a place Google maintains on purpose.
What “no additional requirements” actually means
It is not a shrug. The docs are specific about the bar a page has to clear to be eligible as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode: the page has to be indexed, and it has to be eligible to appear in Search with a snippet, meeting the ordinary Search technical requirements. That is the whole list. The docs then add the line Google adds everywhere, which is that meeting the requirements does not guarantee crawling, indexing or serving.
So the eligibility problem collapses into two questions you already have tools for. Is the page indexed. Is the page allowed to show a snippet.
Built from Google's AI features documentation: the technical requirements section and the measuring performance section.
The measurement part is the part people get wrong
Google is equally clear here, and it is the half of the page that gets quoted least. Sites appearing in AI features are included in overall search traffic in Search Console, reported inside the performance report under the Web search type.
Inside, not beside. There is no AI Overviews filter, no separate row, nothing to split out.
Update, 6 September 2026. Half of that is no longer true, and I am leaving the original sentence above rather than quietly rewriting it. Google’s generative AI performance report finished rolling out worldwide on 31 August 2026, so there is now a separate row of a kind: a report that counts how many times links to your site were shown in a generative AI feature. It carries impressions only, with no clicks and no split between AI Overviews and AI Mode, so the click half of the paragraph below still stands exactly as written. I have gone through what the new report can and cannot settle in what AI Overviews auto-expanding changes in Search Console.
I pull this site’s Search Console numbers through the API rather than the interface, and I went back through a query-level pull for the last 28 days this morning to be sure I was not missing something. Search type web, dimension query, and the response carries clicks, impressions, CTR and position and nothing else. There is no field anywhere in it that says whether an impression came from an AI Overview. That is not an oversight in my script. It is the shape of the data Google exposes.
Which means anyone selling you a report of your AI Overviews traffic pulled from Search Console is showing you a modelled number or a scraped one, not a measured one. Both can be useful. Neither is what Search Console told them.
The practical consequence is that AI features change how you read familiar reports rather than giving you new ones. If impressions hold and clicks fall, that pattern now has one more plausible cause behind it than it used to, which is worth keeping in mind when you work through impressions but no clicks. It does not, by itself, tell you which cause it was. The counting rules behind that, including how AI Mode treats a follow-up question as a brand new query, are in can you see AI Mode traffic in Search Console.
If you want the measurement you can actually run instead of the one Search Console will not give you, the sampling method is written out in AI search visibility, along with what moves the result and what does not.
What is actually worth doing
Three things, none of them new.
Do not suppress yourself by accident. If a page carries nosnippet, or the relevant section carries data-nosnippet, or max-snippet is set tight, the page can still rank and still be excluded from AI features. That is a deliberate control and it works. It is also easy to inherit from a theme or a plugin without noticing, so check the HTML Googlebot actually received rather than what your template says.
Fix indexing before anything else. A page that is not indexed cannot appear in an AI Overview, in an AI Mode answer, or in the ten blue links. This is why I keep saying that indexing is not a separate discipline from AI visibility: it is the gate in front of it. If pages are stuck, every Search Console indexing status is the faster route than any AI-specific tactic.
Do not confuse agent plumbing with search. Formats like llms.txt are worth a look for the agents that fetch your documentation on purpose, and v2 of that proposal landed in August 2026, but nothing about it touches what Google shows. Keep the two budgets separate.
Treat volatility as volatility. AI features expand and contract on queries without warning, and the reflex to rewrite everything after a bad fortnight is usually wrong for the same reasons it is wrong during a Google update.
What I am uncertain about
Google saying there is no special optimization is a statement about requirements and eligibility. It is not a claim that every page has an equal chance of being cited, and I would not read it that way. What gets selected as a supporting link inside a generated answer is a ranking question, and Google has not published the details of that any more than it publishes the details of ordinary ranking.
The Mueller reply is included because it lines up with the documentation, not because it stands on its own. He said plainly that he was unsure what he was being asked, and I have not treated it as more than corroboration.
There is one thing I was wrong to treat as settled, and it is worth correcting here: staying out is now a real option. Since June 2026 a property-level Search Console setting removes a site from AI Overviews and AI Mode without touching its rankings, so the choice is no longer between appearing and losing your ordinary snippet. It changes the answer for very few sites, but how to keep your content out of AI Overviews covers who those sites are.
The single most common thing sold as AI optimization deserves the same treatment as the rest of this post. Does schema markup help with AI search goes looking for a primary source behind that claim, and comes back without one.
Sources
- Google Search Central, AI features and your website, for the no additional requirements statement, the technical requirements for appearing in AI features, the preview controls, and the measurement guidance. Page last updated 10 December 2025.
- John Mueller on Bluesky, 20 August 2026.
- Google Search Central, Robots meta tag, data-nosnippet, and X-Robots-Tag, for the snippet controls named above.
- Search Console query data referenced above is from this site’s own property, pulled 26 August 2026 for the trailing 28 days.