Your Pages Now Have Two Audiences: People, and the AI That Answers for Them

If your website traffic has dipped over the past year and nothing on your end has changed, you’re not imagining it. Something genuinely shifted in how search works, and it’s worth understanding rather than panicking about.

Google now shows AI Overviews – those summarised answers that sit above the normal blue links – on roughly a quarter of all searches. For informational queries (“how do I…”, “what is…”, “why does…”), they show up nearly 40% of the time. At the same time, a growing chunk of people skip Google altogether and ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity instead. Around a third of people in the US now use some form of AI search, and the UK is following the same curve.

The practical effect: your page often gets read by a machine that summarises it for the user, and the user never visits your site. This is why marketers have started talking about GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) and AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) alongside good old SEO. The acronyms are new. The underlying job – be the clearest, most trustworthy answer to a real question – is not.

The good news first

Being cited inside an AI Overview is worth having. Pages quoted as a source see around 35% more organic clicks than they’d get from sitting at position one the old-fashioned way. AI Overviews usually cite two or three sources per answer, so you don’t need to be the single best page in the world. You need to be one of three good ones. That’s a far more winnable game for a small business.

Lead with the answer

AI systems pull discrete, quotable claims out of your content. If the answer to a question is buried three paragraphs into a meandering intro, it won’t get picked up. For every question your page addresses, put a clear, direct answer in the first 100 words of that section. Say the thing, then explain it. This also happens to make your pages better for human readers, who skim just as ruthlessly as any algorithm.

Check a machine can actually read you

A surprising number of sites quietly block AI crawlers without realising it, then wonder why they never appear in AI answers. Have a look at your robots.txt file and your security or firewall settings. If you’re not sure how, this is a five-minute job for a developer or for us – and it’s the kind of thing that’s invisible until someone checks.

Give the machines something only you have

Large language models are trained on the whole web, so generic, rehashed content adds nothing they don’t already know. What earns a citation is a specific data point, a first-hand result, a framework you’ve named, a worked example from your own work. If you ran a campaign and saw the open rate move from 18% to 27%, say so. That number doesn’t exist anywhere else, and it makes your page worth quoting.

Feed your E-E-A-T signals

Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness – Google’s shorthand for “should we believe this source?” In practice that means real author bios with real credentials, consistent business naming everywhere you appear, organisation schema markup, and content that clearly comes from someone who has done the thing rather than read about it. AI search leans heavily on Reddit, YouTube and Wikipedia too, so being talked about in those places quietly helps.

Track what you can’t see in normal rankings

Standard rank-checking tools miss the AI layer entirely. You can sit at position one and still lose clicks to an Overview. Start noting which of your important queries trigger an AI Overview, and whether you’re cited in them. Even a simple monthly spot-check by hand tells you more than a rank report that’s blind to the thing actually affecting your traffic.

Where to start this week

Pick your five most valuable pages – the ones tied to enquiries or sales. For each, search the main query yourself and look at what triggers an AI Overview and who gets cited. Then rewrite the opening of each page so it answers the core question plainly in the first two sentences. That single habit does more than any amount of keyword stuffing ever did.

None of this means traditional SEO is dead. For the 60% of queries where no AI Overview appears, classic tactics work exactly as well as they always have. The shift is that you now write for two audiences at once: the person, and the AI answering on their behalf. Do right by the first and you’re most of the way to satisfying the second.

If you’d like a hand auditing which of your pages are getting summarised away, that’s exactly the sort of thing a short consultancy session can sort out.