How do I optimize my website to appear in Google's AI Overview?

I’ve started seeing Google’s AI Overview appear for many searches, and I’d like to know how websites can increase their chances of being featured. What SEO strategies or content improvements actually help pages appear in AI Overview?

I'll be honest, when AI overviews started appearing more frequently across my searches, I assumed the usual SEO playbook had gone out the window. So I spent a good few months testing different approaches on my own site, half expecting to need some entirely new strategy. What I found was a bit more reassuring than I'd anticipated.

Google actually published an official guide on this in May 2026, and it cleared up a lot of the noise I'd been reading. Turns out I didn't need an llms.txt file, and I didn't need to chop my content into tiny fragments either, since Google's systems can apparently understand full articles and pull out the relevant bit without any help from me. That saved me a fair amount of unnecessary rewriting.

What actually made a difference was simpler than expected. I started writing my section openings as direct answers to the questions people were typing in, rather than easing into the topic gradually. I moved comparison data into proper tables instead of leaving it scattered through paragraphs. I also went back through older posts and updated anything that felt stale, since Google's guidance suggests freshness and firsthand experience carry real weight.

One thing that did catch me out was FAQ schema. I'd relied on it for a while, but Google removed those rich results back in May, so it's no longer doing what it used to.

None of this feels like a guaranteed formula, and I wouldn't claim otherwise. But writing clearly, backing things up with genuine experience, and keeping content current has, at least in my case, made more sense than chasing whatever the latest AI SEO trend happens to be.