How to rank in Google's AI Overviews.

There's a new position zero, and it writes in full sentences. When Google shows an AI Overview, the answer sits above every traditional result, assembled from a handful of sources the system trusts, with links most people never scroll past. If your site is one of those sources, you're in the conversation. If it isn't, your competitor is.

Why this matters right now

This isn't a future problem. In the UK, searches for "AI Overviews" itself have climbed from a few hundred a month to over 1,600 in the past year, and searches for "AI SEO" have grown sixfold in the same period. Your customers have noticed the answers changed. The brands feeding those answers have noticed too.

How Google chooses its sources

AI Overviews don't rank pages the way classic results do; they select passages. In practice, the pages that get cited share a few habits: they answer a specific question cleanly and early, rather than burying it under scene-setting; their structure is machine-readable, with clear headings and schema markup that removes ambiguity about who they are and what they cover; and the facts they state agree with what the rest of the web says about them. Consistency is underrated: if your address, services or claims differ between your site, your directories and your profiles, you're a riskier citation than a competitor whose story lines up.

Five moves that earn citations

• Ask the engines your customers' questions. Record who gets named and cited today. That baseline tells you which answers are winnable.
• Lead with the answer. Restructure key pages so each opens with a direct, quotable answer to one question: detail underneath, not on top.
• Mark up what you mean. Organisation, Service, FAQ and Article schema tell the system exactly what it's reading. Ambiguity costs citations.
• Line your facts up everywhere. Name, services, locations, claims: identical across your site, Google Business Profile, directories and socials.
• Track it monthly. AI answers move. Share of voice in AI search is now a metric; treat it like rankings and review it on a schedule.

The honest caveat

Nobody outside Google controls AI Overviews, and anyone promising you a guaranteed citation is selling weather forecasts. What you can control is being the most quotable, most consistent, most corroborated source in your category, which, not coincidentally, is also what wins classic rankings.