For nearly two decades, being found online has meant one thing: ranking highly on Google. Businesses have poured time and budget into climbing the search results, in hopes that a top-three position guarantees a steady flow of customers. That assumption is starting to break down.
Search itself has not disappeared and it will continue to be used, especially in the foreseeable future. But what has happened inside search has changed. Rather than scrolling down a page full of links, a growing number of people are getting their answers from AI. They ask an AI assistant a question and act on whatever answer comes back, without looking at the traditional results page. For a business that has invested heavily in search engine optimisation, this raises an important question: what happens when the customer never actually searches at all, in the way search used to work?
The Numbers Behind the Shift
According to Ofcom’s Adults’ Media Use and Attitudes report, 54% of UK adults now use AI tools such as ChatGPT, Copilot or Gemini, up from 31% just a year earlier. Industry audience data from UKOM Ipsos iris puts the number of UK users of AI tools at 26.4 million as of April 2026, with ChatGPT alone reaching a monthly UK audience of 16 million as of September 2025.
Google’s own results pages reflect the same shift. Around 30% of Google searches now return an AI Overview (a generated summary that sits above the list of links on the results page), and Ofcom reports that 53% of UK adults say they see these AI-generated summaries often.
The effect on traditional organic clicks has been significant: research from Seer Interactive, tracking over 3,000 informational queries across 42 organisations, found that organic click-through rates on queries with an AI Overview fell by 61% between mid 2024 and September 2025. Even queries without an AI Overview saw organic CTR drop by 41% over the same period, suggesting the shift in user behaviour runs wider than any single feature.
The same research found that brands cited within an AI Overview earned 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks than brands that were not cited at all. It looks like visibility has not disappeared, but has been moved.
SEO Still Matters – Just Not on Its Own
None of this means traditional SEO is now worthless. Technical performance, quality content and a strong backlink profile remain the foundation that AI systems draw on when forming an answer; after all, large language models and AI search tools still rely heavily on well-structured, well-established websites as their source material. What has changed is the layer sitting on top of that foundation. A business can still rank well on Google and still be invisible to the growing share of customers who never reach the results page in the first place.
So how do you get mentioned by AI assistants? A new practice has been created called AI optimisation (AIO) or generative engine optimisation (GEO): the practice of making a business easy for AI systems to find, understand, trust and recommend. Unlike traditional SEO, there is no simple ranking formula to chase. OpenAI, Google and other providers will never publish a document on the exact factors on how to get mentioned. But through testing and other research, these systems seem to weigh a combination of signals to judge which sources are reliable enough to summarise and recommend.
How Does AI Decide Who to Recommend
A few consistent factors are emerging across early research and agency testing into how AI systems form their answers.
The first is technical accessibility. AI crawlers need to be able to access and read a website in the first place. Checking that robots.txt is not blocking these crawlers and that key pages use clear, well-structured Schema markup. This gives the AI systems a far better chance of understanding exactly what a business does and who it serves.
The second is what might be called entity clarity. AI systems appear to reward businesses that are clear about their specialisation, sector and service area. A page that vaguely claims to “offer a range of solutions” gives a language model very little to work with. A page that clearly states what the business does, where it operates, and who it is best suited to is far easier for an AI system to match confidently against a user’s question.
The third is what others say about your business. AI systems do not take a business’s word for its own quality. They draw on independent signals: industry directories, press coverage, trade publications and customer reviews. A business that features accurately across directories like Google Business Profile, Trustpilot, Bing Places and relevant industry listings, with reviews that go beyond a star rating into genuine, specific detail, gives an AI system far more confidence to recommend it. This is consistent with the wider pattern in GEO research, which repeatedly finds that AI systems favour earned, independent coverage over anything a business says about itself on its own website.
The fourth and final one is that content needs to be useful rather than written to game a system. Pages that answer a question clearly near the top, backed up with supporting detail, tend to perform better both with AI systems and with the Google algorithm itself, which has aligned its own ranking signals around genuine expertise, experience, authoritativeness and trust (Google’s E-E-A-T) rather than keyword density or backlink volume alone. This means always write for the person asking the question, not for the system interpreting it.
Where to Start
For most UK businesses, the starting point is not a complete overhaul but a good audit. Search your own business name and variations of the services you offer, inside ChatGPT, Copilot and Google’s AI Overviews. Are you mentioned at all? Is the information accurate? Are competitors appearing in your place, and if so, what are they doing differently, whether that is stronger reviews, clearer service pages or simply more third-party coverage?
From there, the priority list is usually short: confirm AI crawlers can access the site, tighten up service page content so it answers real customer questions directly and invest in generating real, detailed reviews across the platforms that matter in your sector. None of this replaces SEO. It builds on it.
The businesses that will struggle over the next few years are not necessarily the ones doing anything wrong. They are the ones still measuring success purely by where they sit on a results page that fewer and fewer customers are actually looking at. Remember that ranking on Google remains worth doing.
About the author
Rob is the CEO at Odyssey New Media, a digital marketing agency based in Birmingham, working with businesses across the UK on SEO, PPC, social media, web design and AI development and optimisation. He has spent over 20 years helping businesses adapt their digital strategy as search behaviour continues to change.
