SMEs and businesses of every size have worked hard over the years to make sure Google noticed them. The right keywords in the right place at the right time, woven into a company website, would help keep you hovering just below the sponsored links on page one.
Not any more, though, says Paul Houston, co-founder of Catalyst Marketing Agency. Here, he explains why the rules have changed, and offers some simple steps business owners can take to avoid becoming invisible.
This past few years have seen a complete re-write of how people search for information across the internet. Where once upon a time we would type a query into Google and scroll through ten blue links, now more and more people, including your customers, are asking AI tools for the answer directly. Research shows that ChatGPT alone gets around 5.7 billion visits a month, and over 71% of people now use AI tools to search, with Google now playing second fiddle.
And being second fiddle can be costly, not just to UK SMEs. In May 2025, Apple’s senior vice president Eddy Cue testified in Google’s US antitrust trial that search on Safari had fallen for the first time in 22 years, and blamed AI, and Alphabet’s share price dropped 7% that same day.
And it doesn’t end there. When Google shows an AI-generated answer at the top of the page, 83% of users never click through to a single website beneath it. No matter how optimised your website is, and how much effort you’ve invested to climb the rankings table, the customer gets their answer without ever landing on your site – it’s called ‘zero click search’. And despite doing what you’ve always done previously to get the search volume needed to generate interest and ultimately, enquiries – this is where a business is truly impacted.
There’s a famous saying along the lines of: “If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got”. But I’m here to disprove that, because the questions people ask AI tools tend to be exactly the ones that used to drive traffic to a businesses website, but no longer does. Asking “best accountant for a small business near me,” or “reliable plumber for an emergency callout,” for example, would work in the past if you’ve primed your website. Answer that question well, and an AI tool might still recommend you by name, but answer it badly, or not at all, and you simply don’t exist.
Why a good website is no longer enough
AI tools don’t rank pages the way Google does, they gather information from wherever they can find it, understand it, trust it, and then it gives you an answer. If your content isn’t structured in a way that’s easy for AI to extract, and more crucially cite, it won’t be used, even if a human would find it perfectly clear.
In fact, beautifully designed but text-light homepages, facts buried in PDFs, service pages written to sound persuasive rather than answer a specific question, are all easy for a person to navigate but hard for an AI tool to lift and use.
While SEO is about ranking, being one of those ten blue links mentioned above, Generative Engine Optimisation, or GEO, is about being cited, and becoming the source an AI tool trusts enough to quote or recommend. The two are closely related, but most SME websites have been built entirely for SEO and not at all for GEO. I’m not suggesting you forget SEO altogether, rather it’s important to know how search is shaping up with GEO.
It may make you come across as slightly less conversational, but it comes down to whether your content actually answers the question someone’s asking, clearly and specifically, rather than talking around it. For instance, are your credentials, reviews and case studies easy to find and easy to verify. And, what are other people saying about you? Here’s where digital PR has become more integral to wider search strategies, because AI tools don’t just take your word for it, they take signals from trade press, and directories, the same way a customer might ask around before choosing who to call.
Likewise, content that hasn’t been touched in years, such as news items and case studies dating back to 2020, has become stale – to humans and AI.
Finally, it’s quite revealing that 28% of Gen Z now begin their searches inside ChatGPT before they ever open Google, more than any other age group. This means that you’re invisible to the people who’ll be making buying decisions for the next thirty years. So it’s not just a fad, or something “the kids” use, it’s something that is now reshaping how people find you, now, and in the future.
The good news is, you don’t need to break the bank to get it right – there’s plenty you can do yourself to start moving in the right direction again. Some simple steps include going through your website and rewriting key pages so they answer specific customer questions in plain, direct language, rather than general “marketing” copy. Make sure your accreditations, reviews and credentials are visible and easy to find, not buried where no one will ever go to click. Get mentioned by trade bodies, and the trade and local press where you can, and revisit and update your most important pages regularly rather than leaving them to gather dust.
None of this replaces good service or a strong reputation, but reputation now needs to be legible to machines as well as humans, because over the next few years, being cited and recommended by AI tools will be as fought over as page one Google rankings once were.