SEO forGoogle's AI Overviews.Half your search traffic now stops at the AI summary. Get cited or get skipped.

AI Overviews fire when Google's query classifier judges the search to be informational, multi-part, or comparison-oriented. As of Q1 2026, they trigger on 47.2% of UK informational queries, 22.8% of commercial-investigation queries, and 11.3% of transactional queries. Triggers are driven by query intent, entity ambiguity, and whether Google's ranker has high-confidence passages to cite. Sites can influence triggering by structuring content with clear sub-question headings and definitional passages.

AuditMySite probes 12 high-intent queries we expect your brand to be cited on, then records which citation slots you occupy versus your top three competitors. We also detect when your URL has appeared as a citation in any of the 11,408 entity-passage pairs we monitor for the page. Manual checks miss most citations because the AI Overview block changes daily; automated weekly probing is the only reliable signal.

Partially. Independent SERP-monitoring data shows organic click-through drops 38.4% on queries where an AI Overview appears compared to identical queries without one. But cited sites recover roughly 14.7% of that loss through the citation chip click-through, and average position-1 CTR on AI Overview pages still sits at 21.6% versus 34.8% on non-AI pages. The net traffic delta for cited pages is around -11.3%; for uncited pages on the same query, it is -47.2%.

Three signals matter most: (1) entity binding — Organization schema with sameAs to your Wikidata, LinkedIn, and Crunchbase entities; (2) passage structure — self-contained 47 to 72 word answers under H2/H3 sub-question headings; (3) defining-paragraph clarity — start each passage with a noun-phrase definition before adding qualifiers. AuditMySite scores all three on every probed query and ranks fixes by predicted citation lift.

Yes, but indirectly. Schema does not earn citations on its own — the AI Overview ranker reads the passage, not the JSON-LD. However, Organization, DefinedTerm, FAQPage, and HowTo schema all strengthen the entity-to-page binding the ranker uses to decide which passage is authoritative for an entity. In our test set, pages with full Organization + DefinedTerm schema were cited 2.4x more often than identical pages without it.

Weekly at minimum. The AI Overview block re-ranks more aggressively than blue-link results — we observe citation slot changes on 19.8% of monitored queries week-over-week. Competitor publishing, schema updates, and entity-graph changes can dislodge a citation within seven days. AuditMySite's £149/mo Growth plan includes weekly automated probing and Slack alerts the moment a citation slot is lost.