You will be able to explain what Google says about how its AI features select pages and what that means for your site.
A parent searches "how to help my child with PSLE maths problem sums" and, before any ordinary results, Google shows a few paragraphs of summary with small links beside them. She reads the summary, taps one of the links and lands on a tutor's guide. Priya's guide, which ranks fifth in the ordinary results below, is not among the links. Priya's question is the obvious one: how does Google choose which pages to link in that summary, and what does she have to do differently?
That summary is an AI Overview. Google also offers AI Mode, a separate search experience where people can ask longer questions and follow-ups and get AI-generated answers with links. This lesson covers what Google itself says about how both choose their links, which turns out to be shorter and less mysterious than much of what you will read elsewhere.
Google publishes a page for site owners called AI features and your website, on Search Central. It explains that AI Overviews and AI Mode are built into Google Search and draw on Google's search index and ranking systems. The AI-generated response is shown with links to pages on the web that support the information in it, so people can check the source and read further.
That means the pages these features can link to are pages Google has crawled and indexed, exactly the pages you worked on in modules 1 to 4. A page Google has not indexed, for any of the reasons covered in lesson 1.1, Crawling, indexing and serving: how a page gets into Google, cannot be a supporting link.
Google describes one technique that makes these features different from an ordinary search. It calls it query fan-out. When someone asks a question, AI Overviews and AI Mode may run several related searches on subtopics of the question, and across different data sources, then use the results to build the response.
Take the parent's question. A fan-out might run related searches on what problem sums in the PSLE involve, which heuristics are commonly taught, how parents can practise at home and when to consider tuition. The pages that answer those subtopics well can become supporting links, even if they do not rank highly for the original question.
This explains something Priya noticed when she looked more closely. Two of the links in the AI Overview came from pages that ranked well for narrower questions, one about the model method and one about practising at home. Google has said that because of this technique, AI features may show a wider and more varied set of links than a classic search for the same words. A page that answers one subtopic clearly has a chance to be linked, which is good news for the topic clusters from lesson 5.4, Topic clusters and internal links.
The most useful sentence on Google's page is about eligibility. To be eligible to be shown as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, Google says a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet. It adds that there are no additional technical requirements.
So there is no special tag, file or markup that gets a page into AI Overviews, according to Google. Being eligible for a snippet means the page is indexed and has not been blocked from showing a snippet, for example with a nosnippet rule. Google's page explains that the same controls site owners use for ordinary results, such as nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet and noindex, also apply to how content is used in these AI features.
Eligibility is not a guarantee, any more than being indexed guarantees a top ranking. Google's systems still choose which pages to link for each response, and you cannot see the full process.
Google's advice to site owners who want to appear in AI features is direct: the same SEO best practices apply. Its page lists things you will recognise from this course: make sure Googlebot can crawl the page, make content easy to find through internal links, provide a good page experience, put important content in text, make sure structured data matches visible content, and above all create helpful, reliable, people-first content.
For Priya, that meant no new tactic. It meant checking that her heuristics guide was indexed, that its sections answered clear questions in plain text, and that the cluster pages around it covered the subtopics a parent might ask about. The work in modules 1 to 7 is the work here.
Google's page also notes that sites appearing in these features are included in the overall search traffic reported in Search Console. You will read those figures in module 9.
AI Overviews do not appear for every search. They appear more often for questions where a summary helps, and less often for simple navigational searches. They can also change from one day to the next.
So look before you plan. Take five of your priority searches, search each on Google, signed out and on a Singapore connection, and note whether an AI Overview appears. Where it does, record which sites it links to, then compare them with the top five ordinary results below it. The activity below sets this out.
Search five of your priority queries on Google, note whether an AI Overview appears and which sites it links to, and compare with the organic top five.
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