Optimizing Content for AI Overviews: 7 Best Practices

First introduced back in May 2024, Google’s AI Overviews began appearing sparsely for mostly informational keywords. 

Fast-forward to March 5th, 2025, and they’ve received a major overhaul and will begin to appear more frequently for all types of queries. 

This raises an important question for marketers – how can you improve brand visibility with this new search feature?

Thus, optimizing for AI Overviews is now a major aspect of SEO, so it’s important to know what matters for boosting visibility and what doesn’t. 

Here’s what an AI Overview looks like for reference:

Notice that an AI Overview was generated for a commercial keyword with local intent, which was pretty rare before the Gemini 2.0 overhaul in March. 

That means SEOs everywhere will have to take AI Overviews into account, even for local SEO strategies. 

Also, each Overview consists of an AI-generated summary, various citations, and a source panel containing 3 relevant search results. 

Getting your brand to appear in any one of these areas is now crucial for target audience exposure, traffic generation, and online visibility. But how can you increase the chances that your brand will appear in one of these sections?

That’s what we’re here to teach you today, so keep reading! 

Why Content Needs to be AI-Friendly

While generative AI (GAI) search is undoubtedly rising in popularity, it’s still a long way off from dethroning Google – as they still account for 89.74% of the search engine market. 

However, GAI search is gaining traction at an incredible rate. 

According to a new survey by Higher Visibility, 71.5% of respondents use AI tools for search, with 14% of them reporting daily use. While 79.8% of users still prefer Bing and Google for general searches, the fact remains that the majority of people are using AI tools to search the internet.

Moreover, users who still prefer Google will start seeing AI Overviews for most of their searches, and Bing has incorporated Copilot into its SERPs (search engine results pages), too:

As you can see, the Copilot Answer mimics Google’s AI Overview in many ways, so optimizing your content for GAI is unavoidable at this point. 
This is exacerbated by the fact that these generative AI responses appear at the very top of the search results, meaning you’ll need to engage in GSO if you want to snag prime SERP real estate. 

So, what matters to GAI tools when choosing online sources to include in responses?

The main factors are:

• High-authority content that ranks well.

  When searching the web for sources, AI tools prefer authoritative content that ranks well on search engines and is frequently cited online (i.e., has a lot of trustworthy backlinks).

• Credible author bios.

  AI tools pay close attention to who authors online content and will check author bios to ensure their experience and credibility.

• Frequent updates and transparency

  To ensure they provide the most up-to-date information, generative AI programs prefer content that’s frequently updated. They also prefer transparency with things like timestamps and editorial notes.

• Linking out to sources from trusted TLD

  AI tools know that the most reliable content backs up claims by linking out to high-quality, trusted sources. Most of the time, these sources come from TLDs (top-level domains) like .gov, .edu, and .org.

• Content appearing in APIs

  Search engines actively crawl the web to keep discovering content that they can index and reference for user queries. AI tools don’t do that. Instead, they instantaneously pull real-time data from APIs (application programming interfaces). For example, ChatGPT uses Google’s Search API to access its search results, and so on.

The more you can include these factors in your content (like building a public API, including author bios, and improving your traditional SEO), the more you’ll appear in GAI responses and summaries.

7 Practical Ways to Optimize for AI Summaries

Okay, now that you know why improving your online visibility in AI tools is paramount, let’s learn how to do just that.  In particular, we’ll explore the 7 most effective ways that we’ve discovered to optimize for GAI search. 

• Using short, scannable answers (especially in the first 1 – 2 lines)

  First, you need to make it as easy as possible for AI tools to find quick answers to common questions in your content.

  How do you do that?
  
  The best way is to include a short, scannable answer to the titular question raised by the post. This makes it extremely easy for AI tools and search engine crawlers to find. For instance, let’s say you did some keyword research and discovered that the question ‘what is link building’ is popular online.
  From there, you develop an outline for a blog entitled ‘What is Link-Building? How to Build Backlinks in 2025.’  Next, you define link-building within the first two lines of the post, like this: Link-building is the process of getting other websites to link back to your content.
  Boom, now AI tools and crawlers have a clear answer to the titular question (what is link building). As a bonus, it appears at the very top of the post, making it stand out even more.

• Proper use of subheadings and lists

  If there’s one thing that AI tools, web crawlers, and users can all agree on, it’s that easy-to-read formats are the best.

  This means using short paragraphs (only 1 – 2 sentences), subheadings, and frequently using bullet points and lists to break up the text.

  For subheadings, you need to follow the H1, H2, H3 format. Your H1 is the title of your post and should contain your target keyword. H2s are for each major subtopic, H3 subheadings elaborate further on H2 subtopics, and so on.

• Citing authoritative sources

  Remember, generative AI tools want to see you reinforce your claims with reputable online sources.

  Whenever possible, try to find sources from .gov and .edu sites, as these carry the most trust.

  That’s not to say that you can’t use a .com as a source; you should just confirm that it’s trustworthy.
  We recommend checking a domain’s backlink profile to ensure they’re an authoritative resource. You can use our free backlink checker tool to do so!