Google has once again confirmed that in order for Google to show your content as a citation or link in AI Mode, it generally needs to be crawled and then indexed by Google. This is the same thing for a page to be shown in Google Search, Google AI Overviews and other Google properties.
Google wrote this in their new help docs specifially saying here:
To be eligible to be shown as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet, fulfilling the Search technical requirements. There are no additional technical requirements.
John Mueller from Google also said in a comment on LinkedIn, he wrote:
In general, yes, it has to be indexed in order to be shown as a link there. The requirements we listed are basically for when you're starting fresh: if you create a URL today, what do you need to do to be eligible to be shown? (and like most things in search, eligible to be shown doesn't mean it's guaranteed)
If you remember, with AI Overviews, we saw indexing delays for AI Overviews compared to normal Google Search. And also delays in manual actions with AI Overviews versus Google Search.
That being said, they do catch up (or should) at some point. Also, Dejan didn't take Google's word for it, he tested it.
And SEOs are still needed to help get your content indexed so they show up in Google AI Mode, AI Overviews and so on. Will those pages get clicked on is a different story.
Forum discussion at LinkedIn.
