Googlebot

Google chose not to create a separate crawler or opt-in for its AI answers: eligibility for AI Overviews rides on ordinary Search indexing, with, in Google's words, no additional technical requirements. That is convenient, because every year of normal SEO hygiene, crawlable pages, sensible snippets, an accurate sitemap, already qualifies you for the AI surfaces. It is also dangerous, because the same controls cut both ways: a nosnippet tag added years ago to protect content from scrapers now silently limits what AI Overviews can quote from you, and a noindex removes you from AI answers along with the results page. The practical work is an audit of old directives with new eyes: every snippet restriction and index exclusion on your site is now also an AI answers decision, and most of them were made before that was true.