AIO is a re-ranking, not a separate index
Google AI Overviews draw their cited sources from the conventional Google index. Pages that are not eligible to rank in the top 10–20 organic results for a query are essentially ineligible for AIO citation on that query. The first lever is therefore ranking — there is no AIO-only optimisation tactic that bypasses needing to rank conventionally.
Within the ranked candidate set, AIO appears to favour pages with clear extractable answers, schema structure, and E-E-A-T signals. The same pages that win Featured Snippets often win AIO citations on the same queries.
What we see consistently in AIO-cited pages
In our pattern analysis of AIO-cited pages across roughly 200 queries in marketing, legal, and home-services verticals, four signals appear in the majority of cited pages: (1) the answer to the query in the first 80 words of the page body, (2) the query (or close paraphrase) appearing as an H2 or H3 heading, (3) FAQ schema or HowTo schema present in JSON-LD, (4) a named author with a credentialed bio page.
None of these are guaranteed signals — Google has not published the AIO selection criteria, and the system is changing month-over-month. But the empirical pattern is consistent enough to be the right starting point.
What you can't do
There is no opt-in, no submission process, and no way to pay for AIO inclusion. There is also no way to opt out of being cited in AIO without deindexing the page entirely (which removes you from conventional rankings too). Google has stated AIO citation traffic is reported inside the regular organic clicks in Search Console — there is no AIO-specific impressions/clicks breakdown as of April 2026.