Explain what Google says about how its AI features pick pages, and what that means for your site.
Search one of your priority keywords on Google now, signed out, and look at what sits above the ordinary results. You may see an AI Overview, a summary of a few paragraphs with small links beside it. Those links are called supporting links. They point to web pages that support the information in the summary, so people can check the source and read further. If you want your pages to be among them, you need to know where Google gets them.
Google also runs AI Mode. This is a separate search experience where people ask longer questions and follow-ups, and it gives AI-generated answers with links. The rules for links described below apply to both features.
A lot has been written elsewhere about how to get into these features. Google's own account is shorter and less mysterious. It is on Google's Search Central page for site owners, titled "AI features and your website".
Take a parent who searches "how to help my child with PSLE maths problem sums". An AI Overview appears above the ordinary results. The parent reads the summary, taps one of its links and lands on a tutor's guide.
Priya is a tutor too. Her guide ranks fifth in the ordinary results for that search, but it is not among the AI Overview links. She wants to know how Google chooses which pages to link in the summary, and what she should do differently.
Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode are built into Google Search and draw on Google's search index and ranking systems. This means the links come from pages Google has already crawled and indexed. A page Google has not indexed cannot be a supporting link, however good it is. Lesson 1.1, "Crawling, indexing and serving: how a page gets into Google", sets out the reasons a page may not be indexed. The indexing and crawling work you did in Modules 1 to 4 is what makes your pages linkable here.
Google describes a technique it calls query fan-out. The features may run several related searches on subtopics of the question, across different data sources, and use the results to build the response. For the parent's question, the related searches might cover what PSLE problem sums involve, which heuristics are commonly taught, how parents can practise at home, and when to consider tuition.
So a page that answers a subtopic well can become a supporting link even if it does not rank highly for the original question. Google says that because of query fan-out, AI features may show a wider and more varied set of links than a classic search for the same words.
When Priya looked more closely, she noticed that two of the links in the AI Overview came from pages ranking well for narrower questions. One was about the model method and one was about practising at home. A page that answers one subtopic clearly has a chance to be linked, and this benefits topic clusters, which are covered in Lesson 5.4, "Topic clusters and internal links".
To be eligible as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet. Google says there are no additional technical requirements. No special tag, file or markup gets a page into AI Overviews.
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. The controls you already use for ordinary results also apply to how your content is used in these AI features. Those controls are nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet and noindex. If any of them is set on a page you want linked, check that it was set on purpose.
Eligibility does not guarantee a link, in the same way that being indexed does not guarantee 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 is that the same SEO best practices apply to appearing in AI features. Its page lists these:
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 above all, create helpful, reliable, people-first content
This is the work from Modules 1 to 7, and it applies here as it is. Priya did not need a new tactic. She checked that her heuristics guide was indexed and that its sections answered clear questions in plain text. She also checked that the cluster pages around it covered the subtopics a parent might ask about.
Sites that appear in these features are included in the overall search traffic reported in Search Console. Module 9 covers how to read those figures.
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.
Now check this for yourself. Take five of your priority searches. Search each on Google, signed out and on a Singapore connection. Note whether an AI Overview appears. Where one appears, record which sites it links to and compare those sites with the top five ordinary results below it.
Search five of your priority queries on Google. For each, note whether an AI Overview appears and which sites it links to, then compare those with the organic top five.
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