Most businesses built their online presence around one idea: rank well on Google, get found, get enquiries. It worked well for twenty years, but then something shifted.
A client came to me earlier this year having noticed exactly this problem. Traffic to their website was up year-on-year. Rankings for their key search terms looked solid. And yet enquiries weren’t keeping pace. Something wasn’t adding up.
When we dug into the data, the picture became clearer – and it’s a pattern I’m now seeing across multiple SME clients. AI-powered search is changing how people find information online, and the gap between “ranking well” and “getting found by people ready to enquire” is widening for businesses that haven’t noticed the shift yet.
What AI search actually means for your website
For years, the deal was straightforward. Google crawled your website, indexed it, and sent you visitors when someone searched for something you’d written about. You got traffic, they got comprehensive results.
AI-powered search tools have changed that arrangement. Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Microsoft’s Copilot Search now answer many queries directly – right there on the results page or in the chat window, without the user needing to click through to any website at all.
A 2024 study by SparkToro and Datos found that around 60% of Google searches end without a click – and of those that do result in a click, only around 360 in every 1,000 searches reach a website that isn’t owned by Google. Your website didn’t get the visit.
For some queries this is mostly irrelevant – if someone searches for your business by name, they’ll still find you. But for the informational and exploratory searches that used to drive discovery – “how do I choose a membership platform” or “what does a fractional CIO do” or “digital transformation for small business” – the landscape has shifted considerably.
Worth noting: AI search is still a small fraction of total referral traffic, and traditional organic search still drives the majority of website visits and conversions. The shift is real, but it hasn’t made SEO irrelevant. It’s changed what good SEO looks like.
Sound familiar?
I’ve been having variations of this conversation with clients since early 2025. Some common things I’m hearing:
- “Our traffic is fine but the enquiries have dropped off”
- “I Googled us and got an AI summary – it mentioned us but didn’t link to us”
- “Someone told me we need to do GEO now instead of SEO – what even is that?”
- “Our SEO consultant says everything looks good but it doesn’t feel right”
The last one is worth sitting with for a moment. Rankings can look fine while the way people use those rankings has changed underneath you.
The acronym explosion (and what to ignore)
If you’ve been reading about AI search, you’ve probably encountered a growing alphabet soup: GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation), AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation), AIO (AI Overviews optimisation), LLM optimisation. Marketing agencies are actively promoting these as new disciplines requiring new budgets.
Treat most of this with a degree of scepticism.
The underlying technical reality is that all major AI search tools – ChatGPT, Google’s AI systems, Microsoft Copilot – rely on traditional search indexes as their foundation. ChatGPT references Bing’s index. Google AI Overviews build on Google’s index. They also deploy their own crawlers to access and understand website content directly, which means the same technical factors that help you rank in traditional search – clear structure, authoritative content, good technical foundations – help you appear in AI-generated responses.
What has changed is the type of content that performs well. AI tools pull from content that clearly and directly answers specific questions. Long, vague brand pages don’t serve that purpose. Specific, well-structured explanations of what you do and who you help – using the language your clients actually use – do.
What actually helps
This is where I’ll save you some money.
You don’t need to hire an “AI search specialist” or buy a new suite of tools to audit your “LLM visibility score.” A lot of what’s being sold as AI search optimisation is existing SEO practice rebadged with new terminology and a price premium attached.
What does make sense is writing content that answers the questions your prospective clients actually ask – not as a keyword exercise, but as a genuine attempt to be useful. Making your expertise explicit on your website rather than buried or assumed. Keeping your technical foundations clean: page structure, heading hierarchy, descriptive page titles, good internal linking. And publishing consistently rather than frantically – AI tools reference content that demonstrates ongoing expertise, not a burst of activity followed by silence.
If your website has pages that haven’t been updated in three or more years, a content audit is a practical first step. Google Search Console will show you which pages have high impressions but low click-through rates – that’s often where the problem is.
None of this is new. It’s just more important than it used to be.
One thing to be genuinely thoughtful about
We published a post in July 2025 about Cloudflare’s decision to start blocking AI crawlers from client websites by default. It raised a question worth revisiting here: if AI tools are summarising your content without sending traffic back to you, is being referenced in AI answers actually valuable?
For some businesses, yes – brand awareness and credibility matter even without a direct click. For others, if your business model depends on website traffic driving enquiries, being cited in AI answers without attracting visits is not much help.
There’s no universal answer. But it’s worth knowing which situation you’re in before you invest in optimising for AI search. If your website is primarily a lead generation tool, the more important question is whether your direct traffic, referral traffic and search click-throughs are holding up – not whether ChatGPT mentions you.
If you’d like to talk through what this means for your specific website and marketing strategy, get in touch. Or if you’re interested in the publisher side of the AI search equation, our post on what Cloudflare’s AI block means for your content strategy covers that ground.
