Want Your Website to Show Up in Google AI Mode? Make Sure It’s Indexed First!
What is the Update?
If you want your website to be shown as an AI Overview or in Google AI Mode, you must have one essential requirement fulfilled:
Your page is indexed by Google.
If Google has not indexed your webpage, in other words has not put it into their database, no matter what you do, they will never be able to use your content in their AI generated answers, regardless of how good that content is.
What Does “Indexed” Mean?
Before your content can appear in any Google products, such as Search, AI Overviews, or AI Mode, your content must journey through the following three steps:
- Crawling – When the bots visit and read your page.
- Indexing – Where Google stores and knows about your page content.
- Eligibility – Your page meets the technical and quality standards to be shown in a search result.
For AI Mode, there are no additional technical requirements. If your content is suitable for regular Google Search results (with a snippet) then it is also suitable to show in AI-generated answers.
What Google Says
Google’s Help Center documents confirm that,
“Featured links that are shown in AI Overviews or AI Mode need to be indexed, and need to be eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet. These pages must also meet the technical requirements of Search.”
John Mueller of Google also said in a comment of LinkedIn,
“Yes, as a general rule, it has to be indexed in order to be linked there.”
How to Check Whether Your Page is Indexed
You can check your indexed status by:
- Opening Google Search Console.
- Using the URL Inspection Tool
- Entering your page URL and confirming the status
- If it is not indexed, click Request Indexing
Make sure to also submit your sitemap, and make sure you are not blocking important pages with robots.txt or a noindex tag
How to Index Your Page (Quick Steps)
- Request Indexing in Google Search Console using the URL Inspection Tool
- Include the page in your XML sitemap and submit it using Search console
- Do internal linking from other indexed pages on your site
- Promote your page on social media and obtain backlinks from other websites
- Confirm you do not have a noindex tag or blocking in your robots.txt✍️ Use original, high-quality content — avoid thin or duplicate pages
- Use original, high quality content — do not use any thin or duplicate pages!
- Make sure the page is mobile-friendly and loads quickly since these create better crawlability.
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