How to GEO optimize for AI Overviews

AI Overviews are an important piece of GEO optimization. They are part of Google Search results, not a separate conversational chat like ChatGPT. In May 2026, Google claimed that AI Mode had surpassed 1 billion monthly users. AI Mode is basically a follow-up to AI Overviews, an extension of that experience, and it can begin directly from an AI Overview. So you don't want your brand to be invisible across those monthly searches.

This is a serious game now; you cannot afford to ignore it. Before we begin — in case you don't know what citations and mentions are, the definition and layout are the same across all AI platforms, as explained in how to GEO optimize your brand. But just so we are aligned, here is how they look:

The very first step is to choose the targeted keywords that you want to track and measure them by running them through any AI visibility platform — see how many citations and mentions you get for each, and begin tracking them. You should always keep track of the latest Google pattern changes and what types of websites Google weighs more heavily, so you can adapt your strategy.

Of course, you are always safe if you put your bets on high-authority third-party websites to add your footprint as an off-page strategy, and focus on EEAT for your own website. But for the set of targeted queries you want to rank for, you should always check the pattern.

As an example: for the query people may ask, "how to optimize your brand for AIO," you may notice Google relies on, say, 60% of citations from Reddit, 30% from YouTube, and 10% from LinkedIn to generate the answer. So here, writing blog content as a GEO strategy for this query is a waste of time and resources — you should have more of a presence on Reddit and YouTube.

But then why keep tracking? Because this behavior doesn't remain forever; it changes. It could be that Google shifts focus to reference listicles to answer users, and now you need to reach out to listicle websites. It's always moving, and you need to keep yourself updated by tracking daily citations and mentions with any AI visibility tracking tool — so that when you experience a drop, you can investigate whether there's a pattern change you need to catch up with.

This is what we call competitive gap analysis, and it should be done down to the query level. Your journey begins by going one by one through the queries where you are invisible and checking why your competitors are showing up instead of you. I used Guzu as an example website I want to GEO optimize — and, well, I used Guzu as the AI visibility tool to do my gap analysis. Let's take the prompt "best GEO audit tools."

As you can see in the image above, on the right side these domains are being cited: AIclicks, AI-trust-audit, Buried Agency, and one LinkedIn result. And if you look at the AI answer itself, I'm not being mentioned — I'm performing terribly for this prompt. Time to investigate why. Let's zoom in on the result pulled from Guzu in the image below.

With the AIO results and Guzu insights open side by side, I can see the cited domains are correctly captured — and beyond that, this works as a bonus for my citation and mention work. Look at AIclicks: the "mention rivals" column tells me that in their listicle, from the snippet Guzu extracted, my targeted competitors were being mentioned — Writesonic, Peec AI, and Profound. That leaves me two strategies to choose from:

Back to the screenshot: someone's LinkedIn post also got cited. That's an easier target. For off-page, I can message the person to see if I can get listed — or, now that I know LinkedIn matters for this prompt, publish a similar post on my own LinkedIn page.

Say you go the content route: you write your own article, promote your brand inside it, and hope it gets picked up so you're mentioned to the user. That's not always how it goes. Look below — Guzu is being cited for "best AI visibility tools," but in the AI Overview answer, Guzu is not mentioned — even though the article names the brand.

The reason: AI Overview answers are not based on one source. They cross-check across multiple sources — and only if the majority, or a good portion, of those websites mention my brand and agree it's one of the best does my brand get mentioned. One article gets my foot in the door, but it may not be enough; I need more agreeing sources.

This isn't absolute, though. You could be named in only one article and still get mentioned — mainly when that source has very high authority (say, Wikipedia), giving the AI Overview full confidence to surface you.

It can be confusing whether you should spend time tracking and optimizing AI Mode or AIO. The short answer: they're almost the same. Google's own 2026 optimization guide explicitly treats them together as "generative AI features on Google Search" and says the same foundational SEO practices apply to both.

The practical consequence: optimize AIO for your brand and you will see improvement in AI Mode answers. There is no different strategy needed for each.