AI overviews, explained
The results page started answering
For most of the time anyone has been doing this work, a search engine had one job: hand over ten links and get out of the way. You typed a question, you got a list, you clicked something. The click was the whole point, and everything the industry built sat on top of that assumption.
That’s changed. Ask a question now and the answer is often sitting at the top of the page, written out in a paragraph or two, assembled from a handful of sources the system decided were worth trusting. Sometimes it names them. Sometimes it doesn’t. Either way the search finishes on the results page and the person never arrives anywhere.
I’m not going to put a number on how often that happens. You’ll see confident percentages quoted about this and I can’t tell you where most of them come from, so I’d rather describe the direction than invent precision. The direction isn’t in doubt: searches that used to send you a visitor increasingly resolve without one.
What that costs a business, and what it doesn’t
If a real part of your traffic came from people asking how something works, what a thing typically costs, or which of two options suits them better, that traffic is under pressure. Those are exactly the questions a generated answer handles well, because the answer is short and there’s nothing to do afterwards.
What holds up better is anything with a decision or a place attached. Somebody looking for a plumber in Gladsaxe still clicks, because reading a paragraph doesn’t get the pipe fixed. Somebody comparing two specific products they’re about to buy still clicks, because they want to see the thing and check the details themselves.
So the explanatory article isn’t dead. Its job moved. It used to be a destination. It’s now more often the source an answer gets built from, which means the win shifts from the visit to the mention: your name attached to the answer, in front of someone who hadn’t heard of you, at the moment they were asking.
That’s a worse deal than a click and it’s better than nothing, and pretending otherwise doesn’t help anyone plan.
What seems to influence whether you get quoted
Nobody outside those companies knows how the selection works, and the people inside them describe it in generalities. What we do have is a consistent pattern in the kind of page that keeps getting lifted, and it lines up neatly with things that were already worth doing for human readers.
Five characteristics come up again and again.
The five that keep showing up
A direct answer, near the top
If the question is in your heading, the answer belongs in the next sentence or two, not after four paragraphs of throat-clearing. A system assembling a summary takes what sits next to the question. So does a reader in a hurry, which is why this was already good practice.
Question and answer shape
Content organised as real questions with self-contained answers is far easier to lift than one long argument where paragraph six only makes sense if you read paragraph three. Write each answer so it survives being pulled out on its own and quoted with no surrounding context.
Facts laid out so they can be taken
Specific, checkable, declarative statements. What the process involves, what’s included, what the constraints are, what it doesn’t cover. Vague marketing language offers nothing to extract, which is a large part of why it doesn’t get extracted.
Consistent entity signals
Same business name, same address, same one-line description of what you do, everywhere you appear. If three sources describe you three different ways, a system trying to work out who you are has to choose, and it might choose wrong or skip you entirely rather than risk it.
Structured data
Schema markup does not make you appear in an answer. What it does is remove ambiguity about what’s on the page, which makes you cheaper to parse and harder to misread. Genuinely worth doing, and routinely oversold as a lever.
A cheap way to check your own pages
None of the above needs a consultant to assess. Paste a page into AI readiness checker and it will tell you whether the answer to your own heading actually appears near the top, whether the page contains statements that can be extracted cleanly, and where the structure goes muddy.
Readability scorer does the narrower job: whether your sentences are trying to carry three ideas at once. Long tangled sentences are hard to quote for the same reason they’re hard to read.
Both run entirely in your browser. Nothing you paste into them is sent to a server, which is why they’re free and why there’s no signup. If you’d rather not go through it page by page yourself, that’s what AI & Content Visibility covers.
Questions I get about this
Can we submit our site so it gets included in AI answers?
No. There’s no form, no feed, no partner programme and no paid inclusion. Anyone offering to add you to an AI answer is describing a mechanism that doesn’t exist.
Does this mean SEO is finished?
It means one part of it got harder. The systems generating these answers still read web pages to build them, and still have to decide which pages are worth reading. That decision has a great deal in common with ranking.
Will adding schema markup get us cited?
On its own, no. It makes the page easier to interpret correctly, which helps at the margin. It isn’t a switch, and a page with perfect markup and nothing worth quoting stays unquoted.
How would we even measure this?
Imperfectly, and that’s worth accepting up front. Citations don’t land neatly in analytics. What you can watch is whether people search for your name more often, whether direct visits pick up, and whether enquiries arrive from people who already know things about you they couldn’t have learned from your homepage.
The part the pitch decks leave out
Nobody controls this. Not me, not an agency with a dashboard, not whoever is cold-emailing you about AI visibility packages this month. There is no submission endpoint, no allow-list and no relationship to leverage.
I don’t guarantee that any AI system will cite you, because that isn’t a promise anyone is in a position to make. What can be done is making your pages the kind of source these systems find easy to use, doing it on the pages that actually matter to your business, and then accepting that the rest sits outside anyone’s hands.
If a vendor tells you otherwise, ask them exactly which mechanism they’re using to make it happen. The answer will be vague, because there isn’t one, and the vagueness is the tell.
If you want this done to your pages
Rewriting content so it answers cleanly, sorting out entity consistency and adding the markup that belongs. No promise about citations, because there isn’t one to make.