At their recent Central Deep Dive event, Google’s Search Analyst Gary Illyes addressed one of the biggest questions surrounding AI Overviews.
He confirmed that there is no special optimisation technique for gaining visibility in AI Overviews, and that regular SEO (search engine optimisation) is all you need to do.
AI Overviews use the same signals as traditional search. If you are already following SEO best practices, such as creating high-quality content, you’re already doing what is needed to enhance visibility in these AI (artificial intelligence) results.
Google Product Expert, Kenichi Suzuki, who attended the event, shared a key takeaway on LinkedIn:
“To get your content to appear in AI Overview, simply use normal SEO practices. You don’t need GEO, LLMO or anything else.”
Gary Illyes also confirmed that Google has no plans to support llms.txt files. Similar to robots.txt, these files are designed to help website owners control how AI tools such as ChatGPT and other LLM (large language models) access their content.
This means that for your content to appear in AI Overviews, it needs to be crawled by Googlebot and indexed in Google Seach.
It is important to note that other AI engines may support llms.txt files. In a screenshot posted on X, Ray Martinez confirmed that an analysis of log files across several sites showed OpenAI had already crawled the llms.txt file.
What does this mean for website owners?
If you want your content to appear in Google’s AI Overviews, you don’t need to do anything new or different. What works for normal Google rankings works for AI Overviews.
Create helpful, trustworthy content and make sure that Google can find, crawl and index these pages. That’s all you need to do.
If you are worried about how other AI tools such as ChatGPT or Perplexity find and use the content on your website, you may want to consider adding an llms.txt file.
Curious to know if your website is optimised for Google’s AI Overviews? Reach out to the team at Engage Web today.
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