What Google and Bing Officially Say and Report About AI Answers

Google and Bing have both written down how their AI answers select and credit pages, and both now run first-party reports for it. Several of those pages are newer than the advice still circulating about llms.txt files, chunking and schema. What follows is what each vendor states about eligibility, structured data, owner controls and reporting, with the publisher's own date beside each source that shows one; we read every page on October 7, 2026. A budget for generative engine optimization is easier to defend when each line item traces to a dated source.

What does Google Search Central say about AI features in 2026?

Google Search Central's guidance on AI features, SEO and AI Overviews in 2026 sits in a guide called "Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search", last updated July 10, 2026. Its view of AEO and GEO is blunt: "From Google Search's perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO."

Google Search Central sets two eligibility conditions there. A page "must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet". The second is newer: "a site must be included in Search generative AI features in Search Console to be eligible for display in generative AI features on Google Search." Inclusion is the default, so that condition only matters if someone changed the setting.

The guide also lists tactics to ignore for Google Search: llms.txt and similar files, chunking, rewriting copy for AI systems, seeking inauthentic mentions, and overfocusing on structured data. Keeping an llms.txt file "will neither harm nor help your site's visibility or rankings in Google Search, as Google Search ignores them." Publishing a separate page for every fan-out query, when the main aim is to manipulate rankings or AI responses, is named as a violation of Google's scaled content abuse policy.

Is Google's 2025 guidance still current?

The Google Search Central guidance on AI features and SEO for AI Overviews from 2025 is still online, and it now needs one footnote. Google Search Central states on "AI features and your website" (last updated December 10, 2025): "There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary." The 2026 guide keeps that baseline and adds the Search Console inclusion condition, which we found no mention of on the older page.

The rest holds up. In a post dated May 21, 2025, Google Search Central told site owners to make "unique, non-commodity content" and to expect that "More restrictive permissions will limit how your content is featured in our AI experiences."

Does Google want pages structured or chunked for AI Overviews?

On structured content, Google Search Central's AI features and SEO guidance for AI Overviews asks for ordinary editorial structure. The 2026 guide recommends paragraphs, sections and clear headings for readers, then rules out the stronger version: "There's no requirement to break your content into tiny pieces for AI to better understand it."

Microsoft puts more weight on format. The Bing Webmaster Tools help page for AI Performance suggests: "Use descriptive headings, concise sections, tables, and FAQ-style content to make information easier to understand and reference in AI answers." One well-organized page satisfies both vendors, and neither documents a rebuild into fragments as a requirement. Our guide on how to get cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews covers page structure further.

What the public documentation says about helpful content and structured data

Google Search Central's AI features documentation leans on two parts of its public documentation: the helpful content guidance and the structured data policies. On the first, the page tells owners to focus on "creating helpful, reliable, people-first content". On the second, its checklist item is narrow: "Making sure your structured data matches the visible text on the page". Accuracy of existing markup is the documented ask.

Is schema markup required for AI Overviews or Copilot answers?

For AI search, schema markup and structured data are optional for AI Overviews under Google Search Central's 2026 structured data wording: "Structured data isn't required for generative AI search, and there's no special schema.org markup you need to add." Google still advises keeping it, "as it helps with being eligible for rich results on Google Search."

Bing's wording is close. The Bing Webmaster Tools guidelines, which carry no date on the page, say: "Structured data may support clearer grounding but does not guarantee visibility or grounding traffic. Markup must accurately reflect visible content." Schema therefore belongs in the plan for rich results and clean machine-readable facts, with no documented citation lift attached. Our schema generator is a further resource for drafting markup.

What does Bing's webmaster guidance say about generative search?

Bing's webmaster guidance on AI search, SEO and generative search starts in 2025 from the same premise as Google's. On October 8, 2025, Microsoft Advertising wrote that "success starts with content that is fresh, authoritative, structured, and semantically clear", and conceded that "nothing guarantees selection".

The Bing Webmaster Guidelines tie eligibility to the same work: "SEO best practices that support discovery, indexing accuracy, and content clarity also support eligibility for AI-generated experiences, grounding results, and citations." They promise no outcome: "SEO does not guarantee rankings or traffic, and GEO does not guarantee grounding or citations in AI experiences." They also attach Copilot-specific effects to robots directives. The documented controls on both sides:

The first and third rows come from Search Console Help, which says the setting reached all websites as of August 31, 2026 and "isn't used as a ranking or inclusion signal affecting other parts of Search". The snippet row is quoted from "AI features and your website". Legacy NOARCHIVE or NOCACHE tags on pages meant to earn Copilot citations deserve a review before more content work is funded.

Can you track AI Overviews citations in Search Console?

Official tracking of Google AI Overviews citations in Search Console now exists as the Generative AI performance report, which Google says reached all websites worldwide as of August 31, 2026. Search Console Help defines its single metric: "Impressions are how many times links to your site were shown to a user in a generative AI feature on Google Search." The report covers AI Overviews and AI Mode, groups data by pages, countries, dates and devices, and filters by text or multimodal search. We found no query dimension and no click metric in that documentation.

Bing's counterpart is AI Performance, announced as a public preview by the Microsoft Bing Blog on February 10, 2026. It reports total citations, average cited pages, grounding queries and page-level citation counts across "Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing, and select partner integrations". A June 16, 2026 post on the Microsoft Bing Blog added Intents, Topics, Citation Share and Compare, also in preview.

Each report covers only the surfaces its own vendor names. Comparing engines, which is what AI share of voice measures, still depends on prompt sampling and the limits we describe in where prompt-based tracking breaks. Our AI visibility checker is a further resource for a first look.

How do you measure clicks and attribute traffic to AI features?

Measuring Google AI Overviews clicks and traffic in Search Console, and attributing them to AI features, meets a documented limit in 2026: the clicks are counted, but inside the Web search type of the main Performance report. Search Console Help says "Clicking a link to an external page in the AI Overview counts as a click." It also says "An AI Overview occupies a single position in search results, and all links in the AI Overview are assigned that same position." The generative AI report adds impressions only, and we found no documented filter that isolates clicks from AI Overviews or AI Mode.

A measurement plan can still be built on documented data. The steps below are our proposed implementation; we found no vendor report that joins these datasets.

1. Export generative AI impressions by page from Search Console and citations by page from Bing AI Performance, which offers CSV and Excel exports.
2. Pull clicks by page from each engine's search performance report and conversions by landing page from analytics.
3. Compare cited and uncited pages on conversion rate and pipeline at page level, the one grain all three datasets share.
4. Route any change to the inclusion setting or robots directives through the organic owner for approval.

Three failure modes recur. A rise in citations gets read as proof that a content change worked, although Bing says Citation Share can show movement after an update "but it does not establish a causal link." Average position can move once a page is linked in an AI Overview, given that shared position. Totals also disagree across views, because Bing describes its data as a sample.

Which common claims hold up against the documentation?

Set against the pages above, five claims that circulate in AI search advice sort as follows.

Dates deserve as much attention as wording. Between the December 2025 page and the July 2026 guide, Google's documentation gained an inclusion condition and a dedicated report, so every tactic in a plan should carry its source and the date it was checked. Our AI search optimization team works from these same documents.

Sources

• Google Search Central: Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search (last updated July 10, 2026)
• Google Search Central: AI features and your website (last updated December 10, 2025)
• Google Search Central: Top ways to ensure your content performs well in Google's AI experiences on Search (May 21, 2025)
• Search Console Help: Search generative AI control
• Search Console Help: Generative AI performance report (Search)
• Search Console Help: What are impressions, position, and clicks?
• Bing Webmaster Tools: Bing Webmaster Guidelines
• Bing Webmaster Tools: AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools
• Microsoft Bing Blog: Introducing AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools Public Preview (February 10, 2026)
• Microsoft Bing Blog: New AI Visibility Insights in Bing Webmaster Tools (June 16, 2026)
• Microsoft Advertising: Optimizing Your Content for Inclusion in AI Search Answers (October 8, 2025)