AI answers in Yandex and Google: how to become a source

Ask Yandex, for example, "how to choose a stretch ceiling", and above the links you will most likely see a ready-made answer from Alice. In Google a similar block is called AI Overviews. It is convenient: you read the answer and close the tab.

For a website owner this story has a downside. The person got an answer and went nowhere. The website's rankings stay the same, but there are fewer visits.

Below, in plain words: what these answers are, how many clicks they take, how they choose source websites and what you can do right now.

What these answers are

In Yandex, Alice AI quick answers appear above the search results, and a detailed answer can be opened separately. Under the answer there are links to the websites it was built from. According to Yandex data for the second quarter of 2026, quick answers appear in about 42% of queries and are seen by 49.5 million people a month.

In Google there is the short AI Overviews summary above the results and a separate AI Mode, where you can talk to search like a chatbot. According to Google, more than a billion people a month use AI Mode. According to Google's help pages, AI Overviews are also available in Russia and in Russian.

Yandex is the main search engine in Russia: by its own estimate it holds about 70% of the market. So for most companies Alice matters first, but Google should not be written off either.

How many clicks they take

There is already serious research here, and the findings are similar.

Pew Research, USA, 2025. Researchers analysed almost 69,000 search queries from 900 people. When the results included an AI summary, people clicked a regular result in 8% of cases, and in 15% without it. Links inside the summary itself were clicked in 1% of cases.
An experiment by the Indian School of Business and Carnegie Mellon, 2026. For some users a browser extension hid AI Overviews. Where the summary was shown, there were 39.8% fewer visits to websites.
An experiment by the University of Pennsylvania and Northeastern University, 2026. AI Mode reduced the share of visits to external websites by 18.8 percentage points.
Russia. According to Kokoc Performance, information websites have lost about 30% of their search traffic on average since the start of 2025, and from 15% to 60% in some categories.

An important caveat: informational queries such as "how", "what is" and "why" suffer most. Where a person wants to buy or order something, the effect is weaker so far. But answers are reaching those queries too: according to a study by Ashmanov & Partners, the Alice block in Yandex commercial search results grew from almost zero to about 15% of queries between April and July 2026.

Google says clicks from AI summaries have become "higher quality": people leave less often and stay longer on the website. The ISB and Carnegie Mellon experiment mentioned above found no difference in click quality. So for now the claim is disputed.

Where an AI answer takes its websites from

Yandex explains it in its webmaster help like this: search finds suitable pages, a neural network selects the most useful fragments and builds an answer with links. Only pages that are already indexed are used, and well-structured, informative ones are used more often.

Independent research clarifies which websites this concerns. According to Ashmanov & Partners, an Alice answer relies on about 10 sources on average, and the share of websites outside the top 10, that is, not on the first page of regular results, fell from 40% to 10% (from August 2025 to January 2026). After the summer update, for a detailed answer Alice runs a couple of follow-up searches and takes up to five pages from each, more than 90% of them from the first page of results.

Yandex itself says that what matters is not the ranking but the expertise and usefulness of the content. In practice these do not contradict each other: useful pages usually rank in the top anyway.

Google states directly that there is no special optimisation for AI answers: a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown with a snippet, that is, a short description under the link, and from there the usual SEO rules apply. Special files and markup "for AI" are not needed.

In short: an AI answer is built from regular search results. If a website is not in the top 10, it is almost never in the answer either.

How to check your website in 10 minutes

The report in Yandex Webmaster. Go to "Performance" and then "Website visibility in Alice AI". It shows the share of queries for which your website is among the answer's sources, examples of such queries and competitor websites that Alice cites more often. The data is updated weekly.
A manual check. Write down 10 questions your customers really ask and put them to Yandex and Google. See what the answer says and which websites it links to.
Indexing. In Yandex Webmaster and Search Console, check which pages are not indexed. A page outside the index will appear neither in search results nor in an AI answer.
Visits. Traffic from AI answers is not shown separately anywhere yet. In Search Console it is part of the general "Web" search, and in Yandex Metrica a visit from an Alice answer looks like a regular visit from Yandex search. So look at the overall trend and at the visibility report.

What to do right now

Put the basics in order. Important pages are indexed, there are no old addresses returning 404 errors, and the website opens quickly on a phone.
Fight for the top 10 for your main commercial queries. Without it the other steps hardly work.
Answer directly. Price, timing, the process and who does the work should be on service pages as plain text, not only in an image. A questions-and-answers block at the bottom helps, including awkward questions.
Add markup. Organization and FAQPage markup helps search engines understand a page. The key is that it matches the visible text.
Keep company details consistent. The name, address, phone number, services and description should match on the website, in Yandex Business, 2GIS, directories and social networks. That makes it easier for search engines to link all mentions to your company.
Work with maps and reviews. For queries like "dentist near me" or "phone repair in Cheboksary", map listings still bring calls.
Shops: keep an eye on product data. According to Ashmanov & Partners, in Alice's product selections the cards and offers come from Yandex Products, and prices and ratings decide.
Do not block search robots without a reason. If you do not want Alice to use your content, you can disallow the YandexAdditional robot in robots.txt. It will not affect regular results, but you will not appear in the answers either. For a business this is usually not worth it.

What I found on my own website

I checked my own website against these points and found dozens of old addresses returning a 404 error and service pages that the search engine had crawled but not added to the index. Such pages will appear neither in search results nor in an AI answer, however useful they are.

In October I also placed information about the company on about 70 platforms, so that search engines see the same details about RM Systems in different places. I wrote about this approach in detail in the articles "SEO for AI search" and "Website link authority".

And a small but telling fact: over the last four weeks my website got 17 visits directly from ChatGPT. The number is small, but people already come from AI assistants, not only from search.

Frequently asked questions

Can I stop Alice from using my website?

Yes, by disallowing the YandexAdditional robot in the robots.txt file. Rankings in regular search results do not change, but your website will stop appearing in Alice's answers.

Can I switch off AI Overviews in Google for my website?

There is no separate switch. You can limit the snippet with the nosnippet or max-snippet commands, but then the regular snippet in search results suffers too.

Do I need an llms.txt file or special markup for AI?

Google states directly that you do not: no special files or markup "for AI" are required.

Why did traffic drop while rankings stayed the same?

Most likely, for some queries the answer is now shown right in the search results. Check in Search Console and Yandex Webmaster which pages lost visits. Usually these are informational articles, not service pages.

Does "GEO promotion" work?

The honest answer: there is no separate magic. A 2026 scientific review of 45 studies did not find a single technique that consistently and durably lifts a website in AI answers across different platforms. The ordinary things work best: the page answers the question precisely and ranks at the top of the results. That is why work on visibility in AI starts with ordinary SEO for me.

Summary

AI answers have not cancelled SEO; they have made it stricter. The answer includes those who already rank at the top and answer the person's question clearly. So the order of actions is simple:

pages indexed -> top 10 for main queries -> direct answers on pages -> consistent company details everywhere -> regular visibility checks.

An audit of your website's visibility in Yandex and Google results and AI answers: which pages are not indexed, for which queries you are not in the top 10 and what keeps you out of the answer. Send the website address. Websites built for search from the start are described in a multi-page website, and contacts are on the page Roman Mikhailov, developer.