Wednesday, May 21, 2025
As a site owner, publisher, or creator, you may be wondering how to best succeed in our AI search
experiences, such as AI Overviews and our new AI Mode.
The underpinnings of what Google has long advised carries across to these new experiences. Focus
on your visitors and provide them with unique, satisfying content. Then you should be well
positioned as Google Search evolves, as our core goal remains the same: to help people find
outstanding, original content that adds unique value. With that in mind, here are some things to
consider for success in Google Search all around, including our AI experiences.
Focus on unique, valuable content for people
People often ask how to make content that’s “what Google wants”. Our answer is that Google wants
to show content that fulfills peoples’ needs. Focus on making unique, non-commodity content that
visitors from Search and your own readers will find helpful and satisfying. Then you’re on the
right path for success with our AI search experiences, where users are asking longer and more
specific questions — as well as follow-up questions to dig even deeper. (By the way, unique and
valuable content is also important for our blue link results as well). Our
creating helpful, reliable, people-first content
page may help you self-evaluate your content efforts.
Provide a great page experience
Even the best content can be disappointing to people if they arrive at a page that’s cluttered, difficult to navigate or makes it hard to find the main information they’re seeking. Ensure that you’re providing a good page experience for those who arrive either from classic or AI search results, such as whether your page displays well across devices, latency of your experience, and whether visitors can easily distinguish main content from other content.
Ensure we can access your content
Make sure your pages meet our technical requirements for Google Search,
so that we can find them, crawl them, index them, and consider them for showing in our results.
This includes making sure that Googlebot isn’t blocked, the page works (Google receives an HTTP
200 (success) status code), and the page has indexable content. Meeting the technical
requirements covers you for search generally, including AI formats.
Manage visibility with preview controls
Search enables site owners to control what appears in our listings, including in our AI formats.
Make use of nosnippet,
data-nosnippet, max-snippet, or
noindex to set your
display preferences. More restrictive permissions will limit how your content is featured in our
AI experiences.
Make sure structured data matches the visible content
Structured data is useful for
sharing information about your content in a machine-readable way that our systems consider and
makes pages eligible for certain search features and rich results.
If you’re using structured data, be sure to follow our guidelines,
such as making sure that all the content in your markup is also visible on your web page and that
you validate the structured data markup.
Go beyond text for multimodal success
Through the power of our AI, people can perform
multimodal searches
where they snap a photo or upload an image, ask a question about it and get a rich, comprehensive
response with links to dive deeper. For success with this, support your textual content with
high-quality images and
videos on your pages, and ensure that your
Merchant Center
and Business Profile information
is up-to-date.
Understand the full value of your visits
We’ve seen that when people click to a website from search results pages with AI Overviews, these
clicks are higher quality, where users are more likely to spend more time on the site. Why is this?
Our AI results may give people more context about a topic overall, and display more relevant
supporting links, than with classic Search. This may provide a more engaged audience and new
opportunities with visitors, but you might not optimize for these if you focus too much on clicks
instead of the overall value of your visits from Search. Consider looking at various indicators of
conversion on your site, be it sales, signups, a more engaged audience, or information lookups
about your business.
Evolve with your users
The only thing predictable in Search is that it always evolves because people’s needs are always
evolving. The classic “ten blue links” format changed to handle the needs of those seeking visual,
video, news, and other types of content. Desktop displays evolved to mobile-friendly ones. Search
evolved to handle voice queries, or “multimodal” queries, such as taking a picture of a flower and
having Search identify it from the photos.
Our AI experiences represent yet another evolution with Search, so that we continue to best meet
shifting user needs. This evolution also means new opportunities for site owners. With AI
Overviews and AI Mode, people are using Search more often, asking new and more complex questions,
and are more satisfied with their results. AI Overviews display links in a range of ways, and
show a wider range of sources on the results page so it’s easy for people to click out and explore
content on the web.
We hope these tips help you succeed with great content in both our classic and AI search results.
To learn even more, see our new help pages: AI features and your site
and Google Search’s guidance on using generative AI content on your website.