SEO
2026-10-08 · 9 min read
Sapun Lamichhane
Founder & CEO of Arcetis
AI Overviews are generated by summarizing content from a set of pages Google's system judges relevant and trustworthy for a given query, then synthesizing a short answer with citations. The pages pulled into that summary are not always the same ones ranking first in the traditional organic results below it, though there is heavy overlap. What seems to matter most is how cleanly a page's content maps onto the specific question being asked.
This means a page can rank decently in traditional search while never appearing in the Overview, usually because its answer is buried under introductory text, or structured in a way that is hard to extract cleanly. Conversely, a page ranking fifth or sixth can get pulled into the summary because it states the answer plainly near the top.
It is also worth knowing that the Overview is regenerated per query, not fixed, so the set of cited sources can shift from one week to the next as Google's system reassesses relevance, freshness, and competing content. A page that gets cited today is not guaranteed a permanent slot, which is part of why this needs ongoing attention rather than a one-time fix.
“AI Overviews reward the page that answers the question in the first forty words, not the page that ranks first in the traditional list.”
The single highest-leverage change most sites can make is answering the core question in the first one to two sentences of a section, before any throat-clearing. If someone searches "how much does a website cost in Nepal," the page that says "A basic business website in Nepal typically costs NPR 30,000 to 1,20,000" in the first line will out-perform a page that spends three paragraphs on why websites matter before getting to a number.
Lists, tables, and short definitional statements extract well because they map cleanly onto a question-and-answer format. A long, unbroken paragraph of narrative prose, even if well written, is harder for a summarization system to lift cleanly without losing context. This does not mean writing in bullet points only, it means structuring each section so the direct answer is a self-contained sentence, with elaboration following after.
Headings matter more than they used to. A heading phrased as the actual question a user would type, rather than a clever or vague title, makes it easier for both Google's system and a human skimming the page to find the relevant section fast.
None of the above matters if the page cannot be crawled and indexed properly in the first place. Fast load times, mobile usability, clean HTML, and structured data (schema markup for FAQs, articles, products, or local business info) remain the entry ticket. Structured data in particular helps a system parse exactly what a page is answering, which question maps to which section.
Trust signals also carry weight that is hard to quantify precisely: an author with a real name and credentials, a site with a consistent publishing history, and content that is accurate and current. Google has been explicit that it weighs expertise and trustworthiness heavily for queries where being wrong has real consequences, health, finance, legal, and increasingly, cost and purchasing decisions.
For a Nepali business, this translates into concrete, unglamorous work: putting a real author name on substantive articles rather than publishing anonymously, keeping pricing and policy pages dated and updated when things change, and fixing basic technical issues, broken links, slow mobile load times, before investing further in content structure, since no amount of good writing compensates for a page that fails to load reliably.
Keyword density and exact-match phrasing matter far less than they did a decade ago. Modern systems understand synonyms and intent well enough that stuffing a page with repeated exact phrases reads as spam and can actively hurt trust signals, without improving extraction odds.
Length for its own sake does not help either. A page does not need to be 3,000 words to get cited, it needs the relevant answer to be clearly present and well-supported. Some of the most frequently cited pages for comparison and pricing queries are concise, direct, and well-organized rather than exhaustive.
Chasing every possible related keyword on a single page also backfires. A page trying to answer ten loosely related questions at once usually answers all of them shallowly, which hurts both traditional ranking and AI extraction. A page answering one question thoroughly tends to outperform a page answering many questions thinly.
There is no reliable way to guarantee appearance in an AI Overview, and any agency promising that outcome is overstating what is controllable. What is controllable is giving a page the best possible chance: a direct, accurate answer near the top, clean structure, correct schema, and genuine expertise behind the content. Beyond that, inclusion depends on factors outside any single site's control, including how many other sources Google judges equally or more relevant for that specific query.
It is also worth tracking this manually rather than assuming silence means failure. Running your target queries every few weeks and noting whether your brand appears, and how it is described, gives a far more honest picture than any third-party rank tracker currently offers for AI Overview visibility specifically.
A related expectation worth setting honestly: being cited does not always mean being named prominently. Sometimes a page is one of several sources summarized without an explicit brand mention in the visible text, with the citation only appearing as a small link. That still has some brand-safety and trust value, but it is a quieter outcome than a direct top-three organic ranking used to deliver.
Pick your five to ten highest-value questions, the ones customers actually ask before buying, and rewrite those specific pages or sections so the direct answer appears in the first sentence or two. Add FAQ schema where the content format fits. Make sure the page loads fast and is genuinely mobile-friendly, since a slow page can get filtered out before content quality is even assessed.
This is also where a vendor-neutral audit helps, because it is easy to misjudge your own content's clarity when you already know the answer. Arcetis runs this kind of structural review as part of its SEO and AEO work in Nepal, but the checklist above is something any business can apply itself before paying anyone.
It is not strictly required, Google can parse unstructured content too, but FAQ, Article, and LocalBusiness schema make it easier for the system to identify exactly what a page answers, which generally improves extraction odds, particularly for pricing, comparison, and how-to content.
Sometimes, but often less than a traditional top-three ranking would, since the searcher's question may already feel answered by the summary. The value is more often brand visibility and trust, being the name a searcher sees repeatedly, than direct click volume.
There is no fixed timeline. Google needs to recrawl and reprocess the page, which can take anywhere from a few days to several weeks depending on how often the site is crawled, and inclusion in an Overview also depends on the competitive set for that specific query at that moment.