How to win AI overview citations and keep traffic landing on your website
Press play to explore Stornaway’s new feature, AVOCADO
by Brock Horning | September 2026
Open your website to AI crawlers, and you’ll lose that website traffic to ChatGPT and Claude. Close off your website and severely hamper your discoverability efforts. Doomed if you do, doomed if you don’t.
What if we told you that there was a way to open your interactive multimedia to AI and send audiences through to view a video on your site? Welcome to our handy new feature: AVOCADO.
AI Overviews are disrupting website traffic
LLMs and AI answer engines are disrupting the way people discover information.
In an effort to shorten the journey, AI Overviews scrape a page, summarize it and answer the query directly. The searcher learns about the topic but without needing to click through the publisher’s website. Often, there’s barely a mention of where the information came from.
For the publisher, the customer journey is over before it began. There’s no chance to draw audiences into greater engagement on a seamless website when they never even get there.
The picture is more complex with video
Unlike text, video has been generally unreadable to AI engines. Unless it’s accompanied by a transcript, there’s no structure for the AI to scrape to get a sense of topic, and there’s no way to connect an individual with the moment in the video they are looking for.
As AI engines get more advanced, this is already starting to change. And as more people use LLMs and AI engines to resolve their daily queries, closing your content off from AI crawlers may harm your discoverability efforts in any case.
So what if we told you that there was a way to open your interactive multimedia to AI and send audiences through to view a video on your site?
How to get AI Overviews to cite your videos – while keeping the audience, the engagement, and the data on your own site
If AI engines thought they had it tough when trying to analyze video, interactive multimedia takes it to the next level. With branching pathways and complex variables, scraping and summarizing becomes even harder.
Fortunately, at Stornaway.io, we’ve given AI a helping hand.
The new Adaptive Video Optimisation: Crawler-Accessible Deterministic Output, fondly dubbed AVOCADO by our team, has resolved this issue. Every Stornaway project can now be indexed by AI crawlers in the same way that it parses pages and articles, allowing it to understand the structure, branches, chapters and interactive moments.
This means AI Overviews can take audiences straight to the exact moment in a video that answers their query or take learners straight to the module that fills their knowledge gap. However, they have to come to your website to actually interact and move through the video.
Because audiences still watch through the Stornaway player, you get to keep the attention, the data and the relationship with the individual.
Make AI engines work for you, not against you
By using Stornaway’s new AVOCADO feature, you’ll get your videos cited in AI Overviews, but also:
- Keep your audience. Don’t lose your prospects to YouTube algorithms or a Google answer box. Keep the traffic, the brand recognition and the individual relationship.
- Always be attributed. Unlike text, interactive multimedia can’t be summarised into a standalone AI answer. The engine has to send people to you to watch it.
- Deep link to specific moments. AI matches a viewer’s question to the precise point in your video that answers it, and drops them straight there.
- Engagement you can measure. Because it all happens on your platform, you can track, optimise and grow the engagement instead of handing it to someone else’s algorithm.
In a world where AI-generated summaries increasingly sit between organisations and their audiences, this is one of the few mechanisms that keeps video content both AI-discoverable and firmly under your own control.
How to make your Stornaway AI-friendly
To make your Stornaway easily discoverable, it’s worth knowing where AI engines look for data.
Transcripts, subtitles and captions: Subtitles are always a good idea for accessibility – it allows everyone can follow your video whether they are in a noisy environment or need the audio localized. However, they are essential for AI engines to translate what your video is about and guide audiences to the moment they’re looking for. If you’re not sure how to do this on Stornaway, this will get you started >
Video Title & Description: Fill your metadata with clear and detailed information containing your target keywords and topic signals. Try to use words that answer your intended query in words an AI engine can clearly quote. Make sure you include descriptive chapter points and individual topics in the description.
Thumbnail Image: More advanced AI systems can gather topic signals from key visuals so give some thought to your thumbnail image.
And it works for internal AI systems too
Alongside making your videos discoverable for AI search engines, AVOCADO can also integrate with internal AI agents, learning assistants and help bots too.
Say, a new employee is looking for a training video on a specific topic. Your internal AI agent can take them to the exact moment in the interactive video that they need.
We’ll have more on how to getting set up with internal AI agents very soon – stay tuned.
What steps do I need to take to get AI Overviews to cite my videos?
Log in to your Stornaway Enterprise account and follow the steps on our dedicated help page.