If you’re aiming to have your links appear in Google’s new AI Overviews within search results, the key is to rank well organically on Google. According to a recent report, achieving a strong organic ranking significantly increases the likelihood of your links being included in these AI-generated summaries.
Mark Traphagen from seoClarity shared data on LinkedIn indicating that over 99% of the links featured in AI Overviews originated from the top ten organic search results. As he noted:
Google initially stated that the AI Overviews, previously known as Search Generative Experience, would feature content from websites that already perform well in Google Search rankings. However, as Mark mentioned in his post, this wasn’t the case at first. In fact, there were numerous complaints about the quality of those AI Overviews.
Mark wrote.
He added.
To have your links featured in AI Overviews, focus on achieving a strong organic ranking in Google Search. Here’s just one example, though there are many others:
But Glenn Gabe said he has been watching this and said he does not see it in his data.
This aligns with what we discussed yesterday—links in AI Overviews can disappear if your site is impacted by a core update.
Mark provided additional insights in the comments of his post:
- These findings are based on early data from 36,000 keywords. As AI Overviews continue to evolve, we might see a decrease in the percentage of sources coming from the top 10 results. However, even this initial data points to a significant shift from Google.
- The keywords used in this study are tracked by our clients and are typically “money” keywords—informational and transactional terms that are highly valuable to them. Therefore, results may differ for more niche or long-tail searches.
- This data also underscores a major advantage Google has over standard LLMs: Google leverages website authority and has access to far more signals than typical LLMs like ChatGPT or Perplexity.
- All results were based on Google mobile searches in the US.