It feels like AI Overviews are everywhere, but how do you get into them? Try these 8 tips and tricks to break into today’s top spots in Google’s search results.
What Are AI Overviews?
By now, you’ve seen AI Overviews surface at the top of Google Search results. Since their official launch on May 14, 2024, the prevalence of AI Overviews has grown exponentially. AI Overviews appeared on between 12.8% and 16.1% of all Google searches, according to studies done by SEO tools like Semrush and Ahrefs in the summer of 2025, and the number is growing. That may seem like a small percentage, but it’s important to remember that “all searches” includes queries that fall into one of the following buckets:
- Informational (research, planning, and how-to questions)
- Commercial (price-shopping and learning more about a potential product/purchase)
- Transactional (shopping with an intent to buy)
- Navigational (searching to reach YouTube, a specific website, or other resources)
Of these types of searches, AI Overviews predominantly display on informational queries, where Overviews quickly summarize an answer based on citations from ranking websites. For marketers, this adds a new benchmark to hit when optimizing for organic search.
For queries where AI Overviews appear, the goal is no longer only to rank at the top of the organic search result list; we also need to be referenced and cited in AI Overviews.
How Do I Optimize for AI Overviews?
Optimizing for AI Overviews overlaps heavily with traditional search engine optimization (SEO) tactics, especially since AI Overviews are an extension of Google Search, with both relying on the same Googlebot for crawling and indexing of content. Simply put, what’s good for SEO is good for AI Overviews.
That said, here are a few easy tips and tricks that may help score some quick wins.
1. Restructure [Chunk] Your Content
Content chunking isn’t necessarily a new idea, but it’s one that’s been given a lot of buzz and traction with the advent of LLMs and AI Overviews.
Essentially, chunking involves breaking down large paragraphs of content into more easily digestible “chunks,” while front-loading each chunk with a bite-sized answer.
Think of a piece of content as an outline or a series of modules. Each step in the outline or module, if you like, answers a single explicit or implied question and gets its own heading (tagged with an H2, H3, or H4 HTML tag).
Immediately after the heading comes a single sentence that provides the answer or summary for that section or module. If you have bite-sized data or a quick quote, the first sentence is a great place to reference it. This “answer-first” style enables AI Overviews and LLMs to lift and use your content easily in their responses.
Following your summary or answer, provide the necessary detail to back that answer up in concise, descriptive, helpful sentences. Using bullets, steps, checklists, comparison tables, FAQs, and other content elements can serve to both provide information in a format that improves engagement for visitors and enables AI Overviews and LLMs to lift the content for use in their answers.
Tricks Only Take You so Far
The tips and tricks mentioned here are only one piece of the puzzle. A blog post or informational landing page that contains all the AI-optimized structures out there but lacks helpful, unique, or engaging content won’t move the needle. The words on the page matter just as much, if not more, than how they’re presented.
2. Use YouTube to Your Advantage
If there’s one thing Google loves most, it’s citing and promoting its own platforms. In fact, YouTube and Reddit are reportedly the two most frequently cited sources in AI Overviews today.
Recording a video that speaks to a blog post, offers a how-to related to your products or offerings, or answers pressing questions can serve two purposes: It can increase your odds of appearing in AI Overviews, and if embedded on a related page, it can enhance that page’s engagement and ranking signals.
Plus, length doesn’t seem to matter, as Google has showcased both long and short-form YouTube videos, sometimes multiple in a single query, in AI Overviews.
Take, for example, JumpFly’s YouTube Short about using YouTube to display in AI Overviews. Spoiler alert, as of the publishing of this post, it is.
How to Leverage YouTube:
- Make sure your brand logo, company bio, and a link back to your site are featured on your YouTube profile. This will add an external reference that can influence your business’s authority and presence.
- Take successful, existing blogs or articles and upcycle key information into a YouTube video. If it’s informational content users are already engaging with, you know there’s a built-in audience.
- Mine FAQs or People Also Ask (PAA) content for topics, and speak in a clear, concise, and informative question/answer format.
- Turn on captions and make sure you highlight important information about the topic and your brand in the description beneath the video.
- If your account has enough engagement, you can add clickable links to your video’s description. Please note: For YouTube Shorts, you cannot add clickable links. Never fear, as brand mentions also carry weight in the age of AI and can influence your chances to appear.
3. Add Summaries and TL;DRs
For blog posts or informational pages, adding a short summary of three to five sentences or less at the top of the page can go a long way. Summaries should encapsulate what the page is about. For pages that go in-depth on a question or how-to, this section should feature a short and sweet answer.
Why does this work? This tactic serves up the essence or idea of your page right away. It takes the idea of content chunking and delivers as close to an exact answer as possible for the answer engine to lift and use in tact.
In some cases, sites have opted for a bulleted “too long; didn’t read” (tl;dr) list that hits the highlights in as few words as possible.
4. Add FAQs to Your Most Important Pages
FAQ content is a natural fit with content chunking, and it’s one of the best ways to capture relevant question-and-answer queries. Add unique, related FAQs within blog posts and informational landing pages that tackle some of those longer-tail queries users are asking AI Overviews and ChatGPT for.
When adding FAQs, it’s helpful to include the appropriate FAQ structured data, which can define and organize your questions. As a bonus, this will make your FAQs eligible for inclusion in rich snippets on Google Search.
Don’t know how to find those questions? You could ask AI Overviews or LLMs, or you could also check out the People Also Ask section on Google Search results and use that as a launchpad for informative and concise FAQs. If you come across a question that’s a 700-word or longer response on its own, that might be worth spinning off into its own supplementary blog post.
5. Tout Credentials & Cite Your Sources
Because AI Overviews is part of Google, adhering to E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) is critical to success. In order to prove expertise and build trust signals, add your credentials and cite references on informative pages you’re positioning for AI Overviews. Consider:
- Adding an author profile: Establishing an expert or a human authority on the subject goes a long way.
- Showcasing your credentials: What are you an expert in? Include credentials in an author profile, or make a note near the top of the page signaling to users (and AI) where this information is coming from.
- Cite your sources: Include a citation and a reference link, either internal or external, that indicates where your data came from.
6. Optimize Your Author/Brand Profile Across the Web
Consistency is key with this trick. Many brands/authors have profiles listed across the web, from their homesite blog posts to YouTube, Reddit, and other major platforms. With Gen AI, we’ve learned that repetition, especially across multiple platforms, is critical in influencing how brands, including personal brands, are perceived and spoken about.
For brand or author profiles, attaching an important search term to a name can play a role in how AI Overviews speak about us or our brands. For example, whenever mentioning JumpFly in a bio, I could say, “…JumpFly, an expert digital marketing agency.” By consistently describing JumpFly this way, I can influence how AI platforms describe the brand to users.
7. Reframe Your Narrative to Create Something New
With every marketer out there looking to appear in AI Overviews and other LLMs, finding small, simple ways to stand out will make all the difference. This is where the idea of information gain comes into play, which is the concept of adding something unique or different to your page that other ranking pages don’t have.
Don’t have proprietary data or reference guides lying around that nobody else has? No problem! Adding something “new” could be as simple as taking your existing content and spinning it into a helpful infographic.
It could be adding a supplementary YouTube video, as mentioned in the first point, or looking at what information is available from a different lens. For example, that old advertising tactic of “4 out of 5 dentists agree,” could be reframed as, “The consensus is only 80%.”
Taking your data and translating it either from the opposite perspective or in a different format gives the illusion of “new” without having to run your own study. Plus, it gives hungry crawlers a unique take that isn’t on your competitors’ sites.
8. Refresh Old Content
For all AI platforms and large language models (LLMs), there is a strong recency bias. This is true of AI Overviews as well, and there’s a good reason for it. Updating old content has long been a benchmark of “good SEO.” Doing so sends a signal to Google that you’re engaged and committed to providing a helpful, up-to-date, and relevant experience for users.
When refreshing old content:
- Keep the original publication date on the page, but make sure to note up top when the article was last updated. This tells both Google and LLMs how recent your last content refresh was, and it can help you capitalize on that recency bias.
- Update old stats or answer new questions that have come up since the content was first published.
- Weed out any information that is no longer relevant, and remove any links to pages that no longer exist.
- Add something new and unique to your content to help it stand out from competitors. Please note: It should be relevant and address a need that searchers are looking for.
In Conclusion
Tried-and-true SEO strategies still rule the day (for now) when it comes to placement in AI Overviews. This means any content on your site still needs to adhere to E-E-A-T, be user-friendly, and, most importantly, come across as helpful. But there are tips and tricks to try, like structuring your content differently, adding engaging elements and media formats, and optimizing your brand, that can help you gain traction faster. Give them a try, measure the results, and iterate, just like you would with any SEO campaign.