Google AI Overviews and AI Mode in 2026: a guide for software companies

By Roshan, founder of SearchMaxx - Oct 3, 2026 - updated Oct 18, 2026 - 8 min read

Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode pick their links from the same index and ranking systems as regular Search. Google says there are no special requirements beyond being indexed and eligible for a snippet. For a software company, that means the work is ordinary SEO done well, plus two new things to watch: a Search Console setting that can switch you out of these features, and a new report that shows how often you appear.

We think most of the confusion about these features comes from treating them as a separate channel with secret rules. Google has published fairly clear documentation. This post walks through what it says, and what it does not.

What they are

AI Overviews are the written summaries at the top of some Google results, with links to the sites they draw on. Google describes them as a way to help people "get to the gist of a complicated topic or question more quickly" (Google Search Central, AI features and your website). They only appear when Google's systems decide a summary adds something beyond the regular results.

AI Mode is a separate, chat-style search. Google says it is "particularly helpful for queries where further exploration, reasoning, or complex comparisons are needed." It gives a longer answer and lets people ask follow-up questions.

Both are large. In May 2025 Google said AI Overviews had "scaled to over 1.5 billion users" in 200 countries and territories, and that "AI Mode is coming to everyone in the U.S., starting today" (Google I/O keynote, May 20, 2025).

The two features may use different models and techniques, so the same question can produce different links in each.

How Google says sites appear

Google's documentation is short on this point, and worth quoting exactly.

• Requirements. To be a supporting link, "a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet." Google adds: "There are no additional technical requirements."
• No special optimization. "There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary." And: "There's also no special schema.org structured data that you need to add."
• Query fan-out. Both features may run several related searches across subtopics at once, which Google calls "query fan-out." That means a page can be cited for a question it was not the top result for, because it ranked for one of the related searches.
• The rest is SEO. Google's 2026 optimization guide says these features are built on its core Search ranking and quality systems, and that "The best practices for SEO continue to be relevant" (Google Search Central, updated July 2026).

The same guide is direct about what does not help. "You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown to appear in Google Search." Google Search does not use llms.txt. "You don't need to write in a specific way just for generative AI search." And making pages mainly to manipulate AI responses "violates Google's scaled content abuse spam policy."

Independent data agrees that rankings matter. Ahrefs looked at 1.9 million citations from 1 million AI Overviews and found 76% of cited pages ranked in Google's top 10 for the query (Ahrefs, July 21, 2025).

One thing to note for software sites: Google's crawling setup runs JavaScript, and most AI crawlers do not (Vercel, December 2024). A JavaScript-heavy site can therefore show up in AI Overviews and still be invisible to ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity. If you only check Google, you will miss that. See AI crawlers don't run JavaScript.

The controls you have

Google gives site owners several ways to limit how their content appears in these features. Each one does something different, and the wrong one can cost you all of your Google traffic.

Sources: Search generative AI control, Google's robots meta tag docs, updated March 2026, and AI features and your website.

Three points matter most for software companies.

Check the Search Console setting. Google's optimization guide lists being included in Search Console's generative AI setting as a requirement for appearing in these features. If someone on your team switched it off, you will not appear, however good your pages are. Check it once and note who has access.

Google-Extended is the training switch, not the AI Overviews switch. Blocking it is a choice about Gemini training. It does not take you out of AI Overviews, and the Search Console control does not affect training. They are separate decisions. We cover the full set of AI crawlers in which AI crawlers to allow in robots.txt.

nosnippet costs more than it saves. It removes your text from every kind of Google result, not just AI ones. For a company that wants buyers to find it, that is almost never the right trade. If you have one page you want kept out of AI answers, use the control on that page alone.

Changes are not instant. Google says recrawling after a change "can take anywhere from several days to several months." If a control seems not to work, use the URL Inspection tool in Search Console to confirm Googlebot sees the HTML you expect.

How to measure it in Search Console

There are two places to look.

The main Performance report. Google says traffic from AI features is "included in the overall search traffic in Search Console" and reported under the "Web" search type. Clicks and impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode are already in your totals. You cannot separate them in this report.

The Generative AI performance report. Google says this report reached all websites worldwide on August 31, 2026 (Search Console Help). What it shows:

• Impressions only. An impression is counted each time "links to your site were shown to a user in a generative AI feature on Google Search." The help page does not describe a click metric.
• Counted once per site. In the chart total, two links from your site in the same AI response count as one impression. Filter by URL to see page-level numbers.
• Breakdowns by page, country, device and date.
• Two search types. "Web: text-based" for typed searches, and "Web: multimodal" for searches with images, such as Google Lens and Circle to Search.
• The same limits as the Performance report, including the 1,000-row cap on tables.

Here is how we use the two together. The generative AI report tells you which pages Google is citing and whether that number is growing. The Performance report tells you whether clicks follow. A page with rising AI impressions and flat clicks is being quoted without being visited. That still has value, because buyers see your name next to the answer, but you should know it is happening.

What the click data says

Being cited is better than not being cited. It does not bring back the clicks of a page without an AI Overview.

Seer Interactive tracked 53 brands and about 5.5 million queries from January 2025 to February 2026. Being cited in an AI Overview beat not being cited in every month. But cited informational queries still got about 38% fewer organic clicks per impression than queries with no AI Overview (Seer Interactive, April 24, 2026). Seer calls this directional, not causal.

Pew Research found that only about 1% of visits to a Google results page with an AI summary ended with a click on a link inside the summary (Pew Research Center, July 22, 2025).

Google's view differs. Its documentation says clicks from results pages with AI Overviews are "higher quality," meaning people spend more time on the site. Google has not published numbers for this. We go through all of the click studies in Is SEO dead in 2026?

What to do

A checklist for a software company, in order:

• Confirm you are eligible. Key pages are indexed (URL Inspection in Search Console), have no nosnippet or noindex, and robots.txt allows Googlebot.
• Check the Search Console generative AI setting and confirm your site is included.
• Decide on Google-Extended separately. It is a training choice. It does not affect AI Overviews.
• Rank for the questions buyers ask while choosing. "Best X for Y", "X vs Y", "X pricing", "how to migrate from X". AI features draw from pages that rank, and query fan-out rewards pages that rank for related questions too.
• Answer the question in the first few sentences, then back it up with numbers, sources and a table. That is what both a reader and a summary can use.
• Keep facts consistent. Pricing, plans and integrations should match across your site, docs, Merchant Center and Business Profile, which Google says can feed AI responses.
• Open the Generative AI performance report monthly. Note which pages earn impressions and compare with clicks in the Performance report.
• Check the other engines too. Google renders JavaScript and most AI crawlers do not. Being in AI Overviews says nothing about ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity.

For the broader question of which writing and page changes actually move AI citations, see Generative engine optimization in 2026.

Where to start

The first three items on that list take an afternoon. The last one is where most software sites have a gap they do not know about. Our free check tests whether ChatGPT's, Claude's and Perplexity's crawlers can reach and read your site in about 10 seconds, so you can see the part of AI search that Search Console does not show you.

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