SEO and AI Overviews: How to Get Cited When Google's AI Answers (Lessons from Medieval Florilegia)

Search Google for "how to choose an accountant" and, above the results, an AI-written summary appears with a few links on the side. That's an AI Overview. For anyone with a business website, the question has changed: it's no longer just "am I on page one?" but "am I among the sources the AI draws its answers from?" Here's what we actually know, what Google says and what a small business can do.

The Manipulus florum: the summary before the book

Paris, 1306. Thomas of Ireland, a former fellow of the Sorbonne college, completes a work that will be hugely successful: the Manipulus florum, "a handful of flowers." It's a florilegium: roughly six thousand excerpts from Church Fathers, philosophers and classical authors, arranged by topic under alphabetical headings, compiled from the books of the Sorbonne library. As the Electronic Manipulus florum Project documents, it circulated widely in manuscript.

Why does it matter? Because florilegia changed how people read. A preacher who had to speak about charity didn't read Augustine cover to cover: he went to the heading, read the excerpt and took the quotation with the author's name. Authors in the florilegium lived on in sermons across Europe; those left out simply weren't quoted. And the project's editors noticed something: many of the Manipulus's "quotations" differ significantly from the originals. The excerpt wasn't always faithful.

Sound familiar? AI Overviews are a florilegium of the web, compiled in real time. Users read the excerpt, often don't open the source, and whoever isn't among the sources drops out of the conversation. Sometimes the excerpt says something slightly different from what you wrote. So your SEO strategy now has to answer two questions: am I in the florilegium? and am I quoted correctly?

AI Overviews and AI Mode in brief

• AI Overviews: AI-generated summaries at the top of results when Google's systems judge them useful, with links to sources. They reached Italy and several other European countries on March 26, 2025.
• AI Mode: a conversational search mode for complex questions and comparisons, with longer answers and supporting links. Google announced it in Italian on October 8, 2025.

How common are they? According to a Sensemakers report based on Comscore data, reported by Smartworld, in June 2026 AI Overviews appeared in 22% of desktop searches in Italy, up from 8% in April 2025. Desktop only, so treat it as an order of magnitude, but the trend is clear.

What Google says (official source)

Google's page on AI features for site owners is strikingly clear:

1. No additional requirements. No special optimization is needed to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode; normal SEO best practices apply.
2. One technical requirement. To be shown as a supporting link, a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Search with a snippet. Meeting it doesn't guarantee appearance.
3. No special files. No new "AI" files or special schema.org markup.
4. Query fan-out. AI features may run several related searches, showing a wider set of links than classic search.
5. Controls. Limit what's shown with the usual tools: nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet, noindex.
6. Measurement. Traffic from AI features is included in Search Console's Performance report under the "Web" search type. There's no separate filter.

So be wary of anyone selling "AI Overviews optimization" packages built on secret tricks. The work is good SEO, with a few different accents.

What changes for traffic

When users find the answer in the summary, some clicks that used to reach websites no longer do, especially for purely informational queries. Google says clicks from pages with AI Overviews tend to be higher quality. For a small business, though, the searches that bring customers are often specific, local or commercial, and there the website remains decisive.

Seven practices to become a citable source

1. Answer real questions, immediately: a clear answer in the first lines, then the detail.
2. Write self-contained paragraphs with subject, fact and context.
3. Add experience, not paraphrase: your data, typical scenarios, your photos, real procedures.
4. Mind the structure: H2/H3 headings as questions or answers, lists, tables where useful.
5. Keep the technical side tidy: indexable pages, robots.txt not blocking Googlebot, sensible internal links, structured data matching visible content, fast pages.
6. Build authority off-site: an updated Google Business Profile, reviews, mentions on industry sites and associations.
7. Check how you're quoted: if AI misrepresents a page, the text was often ambiguous. Rewrite it more clearly.

What not to do

• Mass-produce AI articles without added value: Google treats this as potential scaled content abuse, per its guidance on AI-generated content.
• Block everything out of fear: nosnippet or noindex take you out of classic search too.
• Chase "magic" files and markup: Google says they're not needed.
• Watch only rankings: measure inquiries and conversions.

A "citable" page example

Picture an energy consultancy with a page "How much does an energy audit cost for a small business." Weak version: three generic paragraphs on efficiency. Citable version: a two-sentence answer up top (what drives cost, what it includes), a table of audit phases and timing, a list of documents to prepare, a "when it pays off" section, a realistic typical scenario. It's the page a customer wants to read, and the one an AI system can quote without distorting it.

Read next

This analysis is part of the dossier on AI for small business marketing. If you sell online, the same logic applies to your catalog: see AI for product pages. And the FAQs collected by a good website chatbot are valuable raw material for content.

Thomas of Ireland picked six thousand flowers from an entire library. Google picks a few from the whole web every time someone asks a question. If you want your site among those flowers, see what we do for marketing and in our services, and book a free intro call.