How to Win AI Overviews

If you’re serious about SEO, the days of focusing solely on blue-link rankings are numbered. Google’s AI Overview panels are shaking up the SERPs, often placing AI-generated summaries front and center above traditional listings.

This shift isn’t just cosmetic. A single well-crafted snippet can skyrocket your visibility and CTR. The problem? Very few SEO Analysts are actively targeting these new snippet opportunities. 

Below is the breakdown—and a playbook you can copy today.

Key Takeaways:

From 1,373 AI Overview snippets across 18 industries, winning citations share the same characteristics: 

• Short paragraphs (not one-liners)

• A high-school reading level

• Declarative openings

• A mild advisory tone

You can engineer this on purpose and scale it.

How I Reverse-Engineered AI Overview Snippets

I wanted real data that could actually help SEO Analysts like myself make decisions, so I analyzed snippets pulled from industries and clients I represent at Saltbox.

Data Collection

I pulled together a dataset of 1,373 AI Overview snippets across 18 different industries (including the auto industry, education, fitness, etc.). For each one, I captured:

• The domain – the website Google chose to quote

• Exact keyword – the search query that triggered the AI panel

• Snippet text – the specific sentence or bullet Google lifted into the overview

Basic Metrics Extraction

Once I had each snippet (the specific sentence or bullet Google lifted into the overview), I broke it down into the following information:

• Character, word, and sentence counts

• Readability scores:

  • Flesch Reading Ease

  • Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level

• Tone flags: in particular, I noted the presence of advisory words (e.g. should, must, ensure)

• First-word frequency: tallying which words most often start winning snippets

• Opening classification:

  • Statement

  • Question

  • CTA (Call-to-Action)

• Phrase patterns: using NLP tools like CountVectorizer, I extracted the most frequently appearing unigrams, bigrams, and trigrams

Key Findings: The DNA of Winning Snippets

Snippet Length & Structure

When you break that down, a typical snippet isn’t just a single, punchy sentence. Instead, it’s a short but complete paragraph. It has room to explain context, offer a quick “how-to,” or describe a process—all in about 50 to 80 words.

Readability Levels

Snippets need to be accessible. Even if your topic is complex, the language can’t be. The data consistently shows that winning AI Overview snippets stay at a high-school reading level. Jargon-heavy writing simply doesn’t surface as often.

How Snippets Open

The overwhelming majority of snippets kick off with a straight, declarative statement. Only about one in five start with a question, and CTAs are almost nonexistent.

Why? Because Google’s AI is looking for content that answers queries directly. Fluffy intros or rhetorical openings waste valuable space and dilute the snippet’s relevance.

In your own writing, make sure to lead with a clear fact or statement. “Your brake fluid should be changed every two years” is far more snippet-friendly than “Are you wondering about brake fluid maintenance?”

Tone: Advisory vs. Neutral

• Advisory modals present in 60.5% of snippets (e.g. should, ensure, try)

• Purely descriptive tone in 39.5%

This is a subtle but crucial insight. Google’s AI doesn’t just want facts—it favors content that sounds helpful. Over 60% of winning snippets contain advisory language that guides the reader on what they should do, how to ensure a good outcome, or why they should try a specific method.

It’s Google’s “helpful content” bias in action. Purely descriptive writing can still rank, but snippets with a gentle directive edge have a higher success rate.

Keyword & Phrase Usage

As a general rule, you can’t expect to win an AI Overview snippet if you don’t explicitly include the keyword the user searched.

But that’s only the first step. Our analysis also showed that Google’s AI favors certain high-frequency bigrams and trigrams—short word clusters that frequently appear in top-performing snippets. Examples include phrases like “how to,” “the best,” or “used for.”

Here is a snapshot of our list of most common bigrams:

These small language patterns align closely with user intent and signal to Google that your snippet directly answers the query.

In your own writing:

• Sprinkle in 2–3 high-frequency bigrams or trigrams relevant to your topic. These micro-phrases help your content match the linguistic signals Google’s AI is looking for.

• Avoid keyword stuffing. The goal is to blend your terms naturally into helpful, readable sentences.

How to Measure & Iterate

Don’t treat snippet optimization as a one-time checklist. I genuinely believe it’s one of the most overlooked growth levers right now. Winning in AI Overviews is an ongoing process, just like any other SEO initiative. 

The landscape’s going to keep shifting. SEO never stays still. The key is keeping your process nimble.

Here’s how I’ve built snippet work into ongoing SEO operations, and how you can, too:

Publish & Monitor

Once you’ve optimized your snippets:

Watch for live appearances.

• Check the SERPs for your target queries within 1–2 weeks of publishing or updating your content.

• Use manual spot-checks or SERP tracking tools to confirm if your snippet is surfacing in the AI panel.

Track your data in GSC.

• Monitor impressions, average position, and click-through rate (CTR) for pages targeting AI Overview queries.

• Compare performance before and after your snippet updates to quantify your results.

Set up reporting dashboards.

• Build custom reports in Google Looker Studio or your SEO platform to highlight changes in AI snippet visibility and traffic.

Refresh Quarterly

Google’s AI Overview models (and the types of snippets they prefer) will evolve. Build a regular review cadence into your SEO workflow:

Update your dataset.

• Keep collecting new snippets for the queries and verticals you care about.

• Expand your sample set to capture new industries or search trends relevant to your business or clients.

Re-run your analysis.

• Refresh your scripts or no-code tools to extract updated insights:

  • Length trends

  • Reading level benchmarks

  • New common phrases or opening styles

Adjust your benchmarks.

• Revise your snippet-writing targets if Google starts favoring longer answers, simpler language, or different phrasing patterns.

Review your wins and misses.

• Analyze snippets that didn’t surface. Are they too short? Too complex? Missing common phrases?

Build Processes Around It

To keep snippet optimization scalable and consistent:

• Create templates. Use the snippet frameworks and phrase patterns in this guide to brief your writers, prompt engineers, or AIO tool builders.

• Incorporate scoring. Add snippet-readiness checks into your content QA process. For example:

  • Length scoring

  • Reading level checks

  • Presence of advisory modals

The bottom line is simple: while AI Overviews might feel like uncharted territory, it’s still the same game we’ve been playing in SEO for years—understanding what Google wants and delivering it better than anyone else. Now, you’ve got the blueprint to make it happen at scale and stake your claim at the very top of the SERP.

Ready to start reverse-engineering your own wins? Let’s go.