Google confirms that AI Overviews and AI Mode don't require extra structured data

Search Central's guide, updated in December 2025, lists the technical conditions for a site to become a cited source in AI Overviews and AI Mode. The answer is uncomfortable for anyone looking for a magic schema: the requirements are the same as traditional SEO.

Editor's note: the source attribution line at the end of this article cites the original document's update date as December 10, 2025. The footer of the source page itself, however, indicates December 31, 2025, a date that the body of the text also correctly uses in two places. We keep the technical content as verified, but readers should consider December 31, 2025 as the correct update date for Google's document.

The document "AI features and your website," from Google Search Central, answers a question that has haunted every SEO team since AI Overviews and AI Mode started appearing in search results: is there a specific technical markup to get a site cited by these AI-generated answers? The answer, updated on December 31, 2025, is direct and dismantles much of the commercial discourse that sells "AI optimization" as a separate product.

In short: there is no additional technical requirement. A page needs to be indexed and meet the same technical requirements that already apply to appearing with a snippet in traditional Google Search. That's it. The documentation explicitly states that, beyond these two conditions, "there are no additional technical requirements" for a site to be eligible as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode.

How the two AI surfaces work under the hood

Before getting to the requirements, it's worth understanding what Google is trying to solve with each feature, because that explains why there's no exclusive markup. AI Overviews helps the user quickly grasp the core idea of a complex topic and works as a starting point for exploring links and reading further. AI Mode, on the other hand, targets queries that would normally require several separate searches, such as comparing options or exploring a new concept in layers, and returns a longer answer with links to supporting sites.

Both can use a technique Google calls "query fan-out": instead of running a single search, the system fires off multiple related searches across different subtopics and data sources to assemble the answer. This means the models tend to identify more supporting pages than a classic search would show, opening a discovery window for sites that might never appear on the first page of traditional results. AI Overviews, however, is only shown when Google's systems determine it will add something beyond the classic search, which is why not every query triggers it.

The two requirements that actually exist

The documentation sums up technical eligibility in two points, and it's worth copying them exactly as described, because this is where any GEO checklist (generative engine optimization) should start:

1. The page needs to be indexed by Google.
2. The page needs to meet the technical Search requirements that already allow it to display with a snippet in traditional results.

There is no item three. No schema.org type dedicated to AI, no new meta tag, no proprietary signal. This matters for Brazilian teams that get asked to "implement structured data for AI Overviews": the right request is to make sure indexing and SEO technical fundamentals are flawless, because that's exactly what Google is measuring.

The list of best practices that remains (and why it's not exclusive to AI)

The guide reinforces that, even without a requirement of its own, the usual SEO principles still apply and help a site appear in both traditional search and AI answers. The list published by Google includes:

• Make sure robots.txt and the entire CDN or hosting infrastructure allow Googlebot crawling.
• Make content easily discoverable through internal links within the site itself.
• Provide a good page experience for the user.
• Make sure important content is presented in text format, not just as image or video.
• Support the text with quality images and videos, when it makes sense for the content.
• Make sure structured data matches the visible text on the page.
• Keep Merchant Center and Business Profile information up to date, when applicable.
• Verify the site in Search Console to quickly detect technical issues.

Structured data: necessary, but not exclusive to AI

The point that causes the most confusion is precisely structured data. It appears on the list, but as a general SEO hygiene item, not as a specific trigger for AI Overviews.

Google's requirement is that the implemented schema.org matches the text visible on the page: if the markup describes information that isn't in the HTML rendered for the user, it loses value as a trust signal, whether for a traditional rich snippet or for any system that's going to summarize that content. For Brazilian sites that keep JSON-LD out of sync with the page's actual content, this is the first point to audit before investing in any new GEO tactic.

Measuring the effect in Search Console

Since there's no separate report for "AI traffic," Google recommends looking at the Performance report in Search Console and filtering by the "Web" search type: sites that appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode fall into that same calculation of impressions and clicks from general search.

The documentation also cites a relevant observational data point for anyone deciding to invest engineering time in this: Google found that clicks coming from results pages with AI Overviews tend to be higher quality, with users spending more time on the destination site. This doesn't replace your own measurement with Google Analytics, but it gives a criterion for interpreting CTR drops or spikes that coincide with the presence of an Overview in the SERP.

Controls for those who want to opt out

Since AI is integrated into the structure of Search itself, the crawling control mechanism remains the standard Googlebot robots.txt. To specifically limit what gets cited in AI features, the guide lists the same directives as always: nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet, and noindex. Those who want to prevent content from feeding training for other Google AI systems, without necessarily blocking indexing in Search, should configure Google-Extended, separate from regular indexing control.

The documentation also provides a troubleshooting roadmap for when these controls don't work as expected: confirm that the directive is correct and visible to Googlebot using the URL inspection tool, allow time for the new crawl to be processed (which can take anywhere from days to months, depending on the page's crawl frequency), and if the problem persists, open a topic in the Search Central help community.

What remains open for those publishing in Portuguese

The documentation doesn't detail how query fan-out prioritizes Portuguese-language sources, nor whether there's any language bias in the selection of supporting links, which leaves a real gap for anyone measuring GEO in Brazilian content. There's also no transparency about the proportion of Search Console traffic that actually comes from AI Overviews within the "Web" aggregate, which makes it hard to isolate this feature's specific effect. In practice, the safest path remains treating AI Overviews and AI Mode as a consequence of a technically healthy site, rather than as a surface that accepts isolated optimization.

Source

1. Google Search Central, "AI features and your website" (developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features), updated on December 10, 2025.