How to Get Cited in AI Overviews: What Actually Works in 2026

This is the question we get asked more than any other at the moment. Search results now open with an AI-written summary, and business owners want to know how their site ends up inside it rather than underneath it.

Most of the answers circulating are recycled from each other. Here is ours, based on what we see across the sites we build and maintain.

The short version: the things that work are the things that have always worked, only there is far less room now for anything else.

What an AI Overview is

An AI Overview is a summary that sits above the search results. Google reads several pages it already ranks, synthesises an answer and attaches links back to the sources it drew from. It is a layer on top of search rather than a replacement for it.

Three numbers set the stakes. Ahrefs measured a 58% drop in clicks to the top-ranking page when an Overview is present. Semrush found only around 13% of searches trigger one at all, concentrated heavily on question-shaped and informational queries. And Surfer found roughly 68% of Overview citations come from pages that do not rank in the top ten for that query.

That third figure is the one worth sitting with. Ranking first is a strong signal rather than a guaranteed ticket, which means a smaller business writing genuinely well on a narrow topic can be cited over a much larger competitor. This is the opportunity, and it is why we treat Overviews as something to work with rather than something to survive.

Human content is doing the heavy lifting

Our view is straightforward. Content written by someone who has actually done the thing is the only durable advantage left.

The reason is mechanical rather than sentimental. A summarisation layer reads several pages and lifts the passages that answer the question best. Generic content produces generic passages, and there is nothing worth lifting from a generic passage when eleven other pages say the same thing. Specificity is what gets quoted; the figure you measured, the mistake you made on a real project, the answer that contradicts the received wisdom.

This is EEAT restated for a new surface. Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust were always Google's quality framing, and they map neatly onto what a summarisation layer needs before it will trust a source enough to cite it.

In practice that means:

• Writing from work you have done, not from a summary of what other people wrote about work they have done
• Putting a real named author on every post, with a bio that explains why they would know
• Including specifics only someone involved would have; prices, timings, the things that went wrong
• Answering the question in the first two sentences of each section, then expanding

That last point is the highest-leverage change most sites can make in an afternoon. If your answer sits under 400 words of preamble it cannot be lifted cleanly, no matter how good it is.

Publish in more than one place

A post that only exists on your website has one route to being noticed. The same post cut down for LinkedIn, adapted for Instagram and posted wherever your audience actually spends time gives it several.

This is not really about social traffic; that is a bonus rather than the point. It is that a brand appearing in multiple places starts to read as an entity rather than a domain, and entities are easier for any system to form a view on.

Publish on the site first so the canonical version is yours, then distribute.

Use real photographs

Stock imagery says nothing about a business. A photograph of your team at an event, your workshop or the actual thing you built says a great deal.

Two habits are worth forming here. Write proper alt text that describes what is genuinely in the image; it is read by screen readers and crawlers alike, and it is one of the rare cases where the accessible choice and the discoverable choice are identical. And caption images where it makes sense. Captions are read far more often than body copy by human visitors, and they hand a machine a labelled, self-contained piece of context.

Link your own posts together

Most small business blogs are a pile of unconnected posts, which is a waste of work already done.

If you have written four things about website performance, link them to one another. A cluster of related pages referencing each other signals that you cover a topic rather than that you once wrote a page about it, and depth across several linked posts beats one long page attempting to cover everything.

It also helps the reader. Someone working out why their site is not converting is plausibly one click away from wanting to know what a website should cost or how to make it faster.

Get mentioned somewhere you do not control

Backlinks still matter, and they now matter for a slightly different reason. A link from a credible site was always a vote. It is also evidence that your name appears in contexts you do not own, which is considerably harder to manufacture than another page on your own domain.

Chasing links is mostly miserable and mostly ineffective. Earning mentions is neither. Write for an industry publication. Speak at an event. Turn up to local business groups and be useful rather than promotional. Run something of your own; we organise The Tech Meet in Maidstone partly for this reason, though mostly because it is a good evening.

None of this scales, which is precisely why it works.

Link back from every social profile

Small, dull and frequently skipped. Every social profile a business owns should link to its website.

These are usually nofollow links, so they are not passing authority in the traditional sense. They are doing something else: tying your profiles to your domain so the whole thing reads as one consistent entity rather than several loosely related accounts. Keeping the name, description and link consistent across profiles is most of the trick.

What we will not claim

Google has not published how sources are selected for Overviews, and anyone offering a guaranteed method is selling something. What exists is observational data from tools monitoring large volumes of queries, alongside a good deal of practitioner consensus. Our advice draws on both, and it has the useful property of being worth doing regardless; a site with real content by a named author, sensible internal links and genuine mentions elsewhere was a good site long before Overviews existed.

Overviews are also volatile. The same query can produce one today and not tomorrow, with different sources cited each time. Single-day results are noise.

Where to start

If you change one thing, rewrite the opening of your most important page so it answers its question directly in the first two sentences.

If you change more than that, add a named author with a real bio to your posts and link your existing posts to each other.

The rest compounds slowly, which is an argument for starting rather than an argument for skipping it.

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Devigo builds bespoke websites for businesses across Kent and the wider UK. We also organise The Tech Meet in Maidstone on the fourth Wednesday of every month. If you want to talk about any of this, get in touch.