Your next customer may never click. How to be the answer in AI search.

Search has a new front page. On a growing share of queries, Google shows an AI summary before any blue link, and assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity answer the question outright. For a business that has relied on ranking well, that changes the job: being on page one is no longer the same as being seen.

What the data actually shows

The most careful study so far comes from Pew Research Center, which tracked the real browsing of 900 adults in the US in March 2025 across 68,879 Google searches. When an AI summary appeared, people clicked a traditional result on 8 percent of visits, against 15 percent when there was no summary. Only 1 percent of visits included a click on a link inside the summary itself, and people were more likely to end their browsing altogether after seeing one (26 percent of visits, against 16 percent).

In short: the summary answers the question, and fewer people go looking further. Plenty of vendor reports quote bigger or smaller numbers. Most use different samples and methods, so we treat the Pew figures as the honest baseline and our own Search Console data as the truth for any one site.

What Google says you need to do

Google's own guidance is refreshingly plain. There are no special requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and you do not need new machine-readable files, AI text files or special markup. A page has to be indexed and eligible to show in Search with a snippet, which means the ordinary technical basics. Traffic from these features is counted in Search Console under the normal Web search type.

• Let search engines crawl you, in robots.txt and in any CDN or firewall rules that sit in front of the site.
• Make every important page reachable through internal links, not only through a sitemap. A well-built website makes this the default.
• Keep the key information in text on the page, not locked inside images or scripts.
• Make sure any structured data matches what is visibly on the page.
• Keep your Google Business Profile and Merchant Center details current.

How to become the source an answer quotes

If the basics are the entry ticket, being cited is about being the clearest, most trustworthy answer to a specific question. That is where Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) and Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) come in. Neither is a trick. Both are disciplined content and structure work.

• Write one page per real question your buyers ask, and answer it in the first two or three sentences before going deeper.
• Use the words buyers use. Pull them from sales calls, enquiry forms, Search Console queries and the prompts people type into assistants.
• Say specific, checkable things: prices or price ranges, timelines, service areas, what is included and what is not. Vague pages are hard to quote.
• Show who is behind the answer: named authors, real experience, clear contact details and consistent business information everywhere it appears online.
• Publish something only you can say, such as your own process, examples or data. Summaries tend to lean on sources with something original in them.

Measure mentions, not only rankings

Rank tracking still matters, but it no longer tells the whole story. Keep a short list of the prompts a buyer would type, run them across the main assistants every month, and note whether you are named, cited or missing. Pair that with Search Console: pages with rising impressions but falling clicks are often being answered on the results page, and are the first candidates for a clearer, more quotable rewrite. This is the reporting we set up as part of marketing and growth work.

Nobody can guarantee a ranking or a citation, and anyone who promises one is guessing. What you can control is whether your site is easy to read, easy to trust and the best answer to the questions your buyers ask. If you want a second pair of eyes on yours, tell us about it.