Google's new documentation for AI search, including AI Overviews and AI Mode, emphasizes continuing to focus on visitors by providing unique, valuable, and satisfying content that fulfills people's needs. This approach aligns with Google's core goal of helping users find outstanding, original content that adds unique value. Success in AI search experiences requires adapting to users' longer, more specific queries and follow-ups, while maintaining quality content for traditional search results.
Key Guidelines for Success
Focus on unique, valuable content for people: Create non-commodity, helpful content that meets users' needs. This is essential for both AI search and classic blue link results.
Provide a great page experience: Ensure pages are easy to navigate, display well across devices, load quickly, and clearly distinguish main content from other elements to avoid disappointing visitors.
Ensure accessibility for Google: Pages must meet technical requirements such as allowing Googlebot to crawl, returning HTTP 200 status, and having indexable content to be considered for search results, including AI formats.
Manage visibility with preview controls: Use directives like
nosnippet,data-nosnippet,max-snippet, ornoindexto control how content appears in search listings and AI experiences. More restrictive settings limit AI content features.Align structured data with visible content: Structured data should accurately represent visible page content and follow Google's guidelines to enable eligibility for rich results and search features.
Go beyond text for multimodal success: Support textual content with high-quality images and videos. Keep Merchant Center and Business Profile information updated to benefit from AI's multimodal search capabilities, where users can upload images or photos for richer responses.
Understanding Visits and User Engagement
Clicks from AI Overview search results tend to be higher quality, with users spending more time on sites. AI results provide more context and relevant supporting links, leading to more engaged audiences and new visitor opportunities. However, site owners are advised to shift focus from raw click counts to the overall value of visits, considering conversions like sales, signups, or deeper user engagement.
Adapting to Evolving Search
Search continuously evolves to meet changing user needs, from classic "ten blue links" to formats handling visual, video, news, voice, and multimodal queries. AI experiences represent the latest evolution, enabling users to ask complex questions and receive more satisfying results. AI Overviews display a wider range of sources and link formats, encouraging exploration beyond the search page.
Additional Resources
Google provides help pages on AI features and guidance on using generative AI content on websites to support site owners in adapting to these changes.
The documentation concludes with a recommendation to move away from focusing solely on visits as a metric and instead evaluate the full value and engagement of users arriving from AI-enhanced search results.
