For the past 18 months, the rules of being found online have been rewritten almost completely.
This is one of those moments that history will probably call obvious in five years time. For most of us, the way we have understood SEO since 2010 has just quietly stopped working. The number of people typing a question into Google and clicking through to a website has been falling fast, and the reason is simple. People are increasingly asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Google’s own AI Overviews instead.
Around 60 percent of all Google searches in 2026 now end without anyone clicking on a result at all. In Google’s new AI Mode, that figure rises to 93 percent. When a search triggers one of those AI summaries at the top of the page, the click-through rate to traditional search results falls by 61 percent on average. For publishers, Google referral traffic is down 38 percent year on year. And the overlap between the top ten Google rankings and the sources actually cited inside AI Overviews has collapsed from around 75 percent in mid-2025 to somewhere between 17 and 38 percent today.
At the same time, total search across all platforms is up 26 percent globally since ChatGPT launched. People are not searching less. They are searching everywhere. The Google search bar is no longer the only front door.
Translated for a small business owner, this means something quietly important. Ranking on page one of Google is no longer enough. You can rank first and still not be cited. The new game is not just to be ranked. It is to be the answer the AI gives back when somebody asks a question about your industry, your service or your product.
This new game has a name. Generative Engine Optimisation, or GEO, sitting alongside Answer Engine Optimisation, AEO. They both describe what AI tools look for when they decide whose words to quote. They look for clear, well-structured, authoritative content that answers questions directly. They look for evidence, statistics and quotes. They look for the same warmth and credibility a thoughtful editor would look for. They are far less interested in how many backlinks you have and far more interested in whether you have actually said something useful.
Here is the part that surprised me when I first started learning about this. The platforms most often cited by AI tools are not the polished corporate websites you would expect. They are Reddit, YouTube and LinkedIn. Reddit alone provides around 21 percent of citations inside Google’s AI Overviews. YouTube has quietly overtaken Reddit as the single most-cited source across large language model answers. Real conversations, real voices, real expertise. That is what AI is being trained to find.
So what should a small business owner actually do?
First, do not panic and abandon traditional SEO. The fundamentals still matter. A clear website, good page titles, fast loading speed, sensible keywords, and proper headings remain the foundation that everything else sits on. SEO has not died. It has quietly moved house.
Second, write your website pages and your blog posts as if you were trying to be quoted by a journalist. Use clear headings. Use short paragraphs. Use statistics and sources. Answer the questions your customers actually ask, in the order they ask them. If somebody types “where do I find a wellness retreat in Wiltshire” or “how do I plan a charity event in London”, your job is to be the page that answers that question completely and humanly, with enough authority that an AI tool feels safe quoting you. I write every blog post do the research and then get AI to tidy them as I am soooo bad at proofing my stuff… maybe juggling so much too!
Third, show up on the platforms AI is actually reading. LinkedIn matters more than it ever has, because AI tools cite it heavily and because it gives you a public record of expertise. YouTube matters because video transcripts are now part of how AI summarises a topic. Podcasts matter because podcast guests are quoted as authorities. Even Reddit matters in a quiet way. You do not need to live there. You simply need to make sure that when somebody asks a question in your field, your voice is somewhere in the wider conversation, not only on your own website.
Fourth, do something most small businesses still have not done. Add schema markup to your website. It sounds technical, but in practice it is a small piece of code that tells AI exactly what your business is, who you serve, what you sell, and where you are based. Most modern website builders, including Squarespace, WordPress and Shopify, let you add it in a few minutes. If you have a developer, ask them. If you do not, ask a friend who knows. This one step alone makes you dramatically more visible to AI tools.
Fifth, do not block the AI crawlers. Some businesses, anxious about what AI might do with their content, have quietly blocked it from reading their sites at all. Almost without exception, those businesses are now invisible inside the very tools their customers are using to find them. By all means consider how you want your work to be used. But understand that the cost of being unread is much greater than the cost of being read.
Sixth, build authority through other people’s platforms. Get interviewed on a podcast. Write a guest article for a trade publication. Be quoted in a press piece. Speak at a small industry event and post the talk on LinkedIn. AI tools are constantly checking who is being referred to as an expert, not just who is shouting on their own site. Authority earned elsewhere now travels straight back to your visibility everywhere.
I have been working with small business owners on exactly this through Cary Consultancy, and what surprises me most is how much joy comes back into the process once people understand it. SEO used to feel like a foreign language. Generative search, oddly, has made it more human again.
Here is something that should reassure any business whose traffic has dipped this year. The clicks that survive the AI shift convert 23 percent better than the average click did before. Fewer visitors, but warmer ones. Real conversations are starting to matter again. The internet, in its strange way, is becoming more like the relationships some of us have spent our entire careers building.
The businesses that will thrive in this next chapter are the ones who treat their website the way they would treat a really good conversation. Clear. Generous. Honest. Specific. Easy to find what you need. Worth telling somebody else about.
And the businesses that will struggle are the ones that keep writing for an algorithm that has already left the building.
The technology has changed. The principle has not. People still buy from people they trust. AI is simply choosing whose voices to trust on their behalf. Make yours one of them.
“The future of search is not about ranking higher. It is about being worth quoting.” Something I find myself saying often these days
What is the one question your customers ask you most, that your website has not yet answered properly? Just be honest as this will set you apart!
Sources: Seer Interactive AI Overviews CTR study 2025; Search Engine Journal field study on AI Overviews; Pasquale Pillitteri Google AI Mode analysis 2026; SourceCode AI Search vs SEO 2026; Position Digital AI SEO Statistics 2026; Jasper Generative Engine Optimisation Guide 2026.