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How do I show up in AI search and AI Overviews?
AnswerFor Google, the honest answer comes from Google: there is nothing special to do. For ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity the answer is different, which is the part that gets lost.
Google's own guidance on AI features says it plainly: "There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary." It goes further, and this is the sentence most of an industry would prefer you skipped: "You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features. There's also no special schema.org structured data that you need to add."
The eligibility rule is stated just as directly. "To be eligible to be shown 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." Read 14 August 2026.
So for Google, ranking is the gate. AI Overviews are drawn from the Search index, built by a crawler that renders JavaScript. If you rank and you allow a snippet, you are eligible. If you do not rank, no amount of AI-specific work will rescue you, and that is worth knowing before you buy any of it.
That makes the discipline narrower. Google is one engine. ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity each run their own search crawler, each has its own index, and none of them publish rendering behaviour or ranking factors. Being in Google's index does not put you in theirs.
So the work splits cleanly. For Google, do the fundamentals properly, because they are the whole job. For the others, allow the right crawler and ship HTML that carries its meaning without JavaScript. Structured data still earns its place, for entity clarity and for rich results in Search. Those are Search wins, and they are worth having on their own terms.