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How to get your business mentioned in Google's AI Overviews

13 July 2026 · 7 min read · by Luke Dee

What is a Google AI Overview, really?

If you've searched Google lately and noticed a block of text sitting above the usual list of blue links — often with a few small website citations beside it — that's an AI Overview. Google builds it automatically by reading a handful of web pages it already trusts and stitching together a summary of the answer, with links back to where it got the information.

For a small Irish business, this matters because that summary is prime real estate. If your clinic, salon or trades business is one of the pages cited, a potential customer sees your name before they've even scrolled to the normal results. Google itself has said AI Overviews now reach more than a billion people every month (Google, 2024), which gives a sense of how much search behaviour has already shifted toward this format.

Does Google use different rules to pick AI Overview sources?

No — and this is the reassuring part. According to Google Search Central, AI Overviews are built on the same core web ranking systems Google has used for years, not a separate scoring method. In practice that means the pages most likely to be pulled into an AI Overview are the same pages that would rank well in ordinary search: pages that answer a real question clearly, load quickly, are easy to read on a phone, and come from a site Google considers genuinely useful.

There's no separate "AI SEO" you need to learn from scratch. The foundations are the same ones good web design and honest content have always rested on — they just matter a little more now, because there are fewer citation slots than there are blue links.

Why does structured content and schema markup help?

Structured data — sometimes called schema markup — is a bit of code added to a webpage that tells Google exactly what something is: this is a local business, here's its address and phone number, here's a review, here's an opening hour. It doesn't change what a visitor sees, but it gives Google (and AI systems reading Google's index) an unambiguous, machine-readable summary of your business to draw on.

Google Search Central documents structured data as one of the clearer signals a page can offer for how content should be understood and surfaced. Every SuirViewDigital build includes LocalBusiness schema by default, along with clean, semantic page structure — the kind of groundwork that gives a business the best chance of being read correctly, whether by a person, Google, or an AI system summarising the page.

What should the actual content on your website look like?

AI Overviews tend to favour pages that answer a specific question plainly, near the top of the page, in a sentence or two — then go on to explain further. A page titled "Dental Services" that opens with three paragraphs about the practice's history is harder for an AI summary to lift a direct answer from than a page headed "How much does a dental check-up cost in Ireland?" that opens with a clear, honest answer.

That's the thinking behind writing in question-style headings, the way this article does. It's not a gimmick — it mirrors how people actually type into Google now, and it gives both human readers and AI systems a clean, quotable answer to latch onto.

"Most business owners think AI Overviews need something exotic. In practice, the businesses that show up are the ones with a fast, honest, well-built website that answers the questions their customers are actually asking. That's been good SEO practice for years — AI search just rewards it more visibly." — Luke Dee, SuirViewDigital

How is this different from getting mentioned by ChatGPT?

It's worth keeping the two separate in your head. Google AI Overviews live inside Google Search and are generated fresh from Google's own index each time someone searches. ChatGPT and similar assistants work differently — they may browse the web, rely on training data, or use their own retrieval systems, and they don't always cite sources the same way. We've covered that side of things, including how ChatGPT tends to pick its sources, in a separate article on the Journal — worth a read if you want the fuller AI-search picture rather than just the Google slice of it.

The practical upshot for a small business is the same either way: clear, structured, genuinely helpful content on a fast, well-built site is the common thread that gives you a shot with both.

What can you actually do this month?

A few concrete, achievable steps: make sure your key service pages each answer one clear question near the top. Add or check LocalBusiness structured data so Google has an unambiguous read on who you are and where you're based. Keep your Google Business Profile accurate, since it feeds into how Google understands your business generally. And resist the urge to stuff pages with keywords — Google's own guidance, and simple common sense, both point the same way: write for the person asking the question, not for a machine you're trying to trick.

If your current website is a template that's never been touched since it went live, or it's missing basic structured data, that's usually the first gap to close. It's also exactly the kind of groundwork we build in from day one — see how on our services page.