Every few weeks someone sells a new file you are supposed to put at the root of your site so “the AIs” can find you. I kept ignoring them, and then I got nervous that I was ignoring something real.

So I read the thing Google actually published instead of the posts about it. Google's guide to AI features in Search says, in one sentence, that there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode and no special optimizations necessary. A little further down: you do not need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup, and there is no special schema.org structured data to add.

That is the whole rule. If a page is indexed and eligible for a normal snippet, it is eligible to be a cited link inside an AI answer. Nothing else unlocks it.

What this site sends today

I went and looked at what my own pages emit, because “I already do the right thing” is exactly the kind of claim I should check before writing it down.

Each article here sends a BlogPosting block with headline, dates, author, and publisher, plus a BreadcrumbList. The homepage adds WebSite, Organization, and Person. All of it is generated from the same frontmatter that renders the page, so the structured data cannot drift from the visible text. That last part matters more than the types themselves. Google's advice in the guide is to keep structured data aligned with what is on the page, and generating both from one source is the cheapest way to guarantee it.

What I do not send is FAQPage. I had been meaning to add it. I am not going to.

FAQ rich results are gone, so stop adding them

FAQ rich results stopped appearing in Google Search on May 7, 2026. The search appearance filter, the report, and Rich Results Test support went in June. API support went in August. Google did not write a blog post about it. They put a notice at the top of the documentation and moved on.

For most sites this changes nothing in practice, because Google had already limited FAQ rich results to government and health sites back in 2023. But a lot of tutorials still tell you to wrap your Q&A in FAQPage markup “for SEO.” The markup is still valid schema.org and it will not hurt you. It just does not buy you anything in Search anymore, and it definitely does not buy you anything in AI Overviews, because nothing does.

Where the impressions show up now

The part that is actually new and useful: Search Console has a Generative AI performance report, and as of August 31 it is rolled out to every site worldwide. It shows impressions your pages got inside AI Overviews and AI Mode, grouped by page, country, device, and date.

It does not show clicks. Read that twice before you open it, because you will look for a clicks column and it is not there. Clicks from AI features are folded into the regular Web performance report and you cannot pull them apart.

I learned to distrust impressions on their own from the App Store, when Monetra had 9k impressions and 60 downloads. An impression inside an AI answer is even further from a visit than an App Store impression is from an install. The answer is right there. Most people will not click through. So I am treating this report as “Google's AI is reading me” rather than “Google's AI is sending me people.” Those are different facts and only the second one pays.

The robots rule I am rethinking

While I was in there I re-read my robots file. It allows everything and then disallows one user agent: GPTBot.

That line went in a week ago, in the same commit as the analytics tag, and I had not thought about it since. The instinct behind it is simple enough: I did not want my writing scraped into someone's training set. I still feel that way about training. But Google's guide makes the trade explicit in a way I had not thought through. AI Overviews and AI Mode are fed by Googlebot, the same crawler that indexes you. There is no separate agent to block, and the only way to opt out is the snippet controls you already have: nosnippet, max-snippet, or noindex for the whole page. Block those and you are out of AI answers and out of regular snippets at the same time.

So the position I have actually taken, by accident, is: Google may summarize me, OpenAI may not. That is a defensible position. It is just not one I chose on purpose, and I would rather choose it. For now the rule stays, and I am writing this down so that in three months I remember it was a decision and not a default.

What I would tell someone starting today

Do the boring things Google lists: make the important content real text, link your own pages to each other, keep the page fast, and make sure the structured data says the same thing the page says. That list has not changed. What changed is that there is now a report that tells you whether the AI features are surfacing you at all, and a documented statement that no extra file will help.

If someone tries to sell you the extra file anyway, you can send them the sentence.

Sources: Google Search Central, “AI features and your website.” Search Console Help, “Generative AI performance report.” Search Engine Journal on the FAQ rich result deprecation.