Type a question into Google right now and there’s a good chance the first thing you see isn’t a list of websites. It’s a paragraph written by AI. Search for “best accountant in Cardiff” or “how long does a bathroom installation take in the UK” and you might get a full, fluent answer before you’ve scrolled past a single organic result. That’s Google AI Overviews. Add ChatGPT and Perplexity into the mix and you’ve got a growing number of potential customers who may never click to page one at all.
For small and medium businesses across the UK, this is a genuine shift in how customers find you. Your next customer might not see a list of ten blue links. They might ask ChatGPT for a good local service, get a Perplexity answer with three cited sources, or read a Google AI Overview that answers their question before they ever scroll to the organic results. If your business isn’t part of those answers, you’re invisible to a growing share of your market, even if your traditional rankings are strong.
This isn’t a reason to panic. But it is a reason to understand what’s happening and take some sensible steps.
What is Generative Engine Optimisation?
Generative Engine Optimisation, or GEO, is the practice of making your content discoverable and citable by AI-powered search engines. These engines, including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, generate answers by drawing on and synthesising multiple sources rather than simply linking to them.
That last bit matters. Traditional SEO is about getting your page to rank so someone clicks on it. With GEO, the goal shifts: you want to be cited in AI-generated answers. It’s the difference between appearing on a shelf and being the product an expert recommends by name.
GEO doesn’t replace SEO. It adds a new layer of visibility for a search environment where AI engines summarise, compare and recommend before users click. Think of it as an extension of the work you’re already doing, not a complete overhaul.
Why this matters for UK SMEs right now
The numbers tell a clear story. According to BrightEdge research, AI Overviews now appear on approximately 48% of tracked queries, up from 31% a year earlier. That’s nearly half of all searches generating an AI-written summary before any organic result. And according to BrightLocal’s 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey, the use of generative AI for local recommendations climbed from just 6% to 45% of consumers in a single year.
The tricky part is that your Google ranking and your AI visibility are measured completely separately. According to SOCi’s 2026 Local Visibility Index, which analysed over 350,000 business locations, ChatGPT recommends just 1.2% of local businesses. By comparison, those same businesses appear in Google’s local 3-pack 35.9% of the time. That’s roughly a 30-fold gap. Gemini recommended 11% of locations; Perplexity, 7.4%. The same study found that strong performance in Google’s local results does not automatically translate into AI visibility. In retail, fewer than half the brands performing well in traditional local search also appeared in AI recommendations.
For a Cardiff plumber who’s worked hard to rank on page one, that’s a sobering thought. You can be sitting at position two in organic results and still be completely absent from the AI answer a potential customer reads instead.
How AI engines decide who to cite
AI Overviews don’t pull listings. They construct an answer and then decide which sources to credit for it. So the question becomes: what makes a source credible enough to cite?
The signals are fairly consistent across platforms. AI systems favour content that is well-structured, factually clear and backed by a trustworthy website. A scrappy five-page site with thin content and no clear about page is unlikely to make the cut, regardless of how good the business behind it is.
Your business information also needs to be consistent everywhere it appears online. AI systems cross-reference sources to verify whether a business is real and reliable. Your Google Business Profile doesn’t live in isolation. Google’s AI and others pull in data from your connected listings and social profiles to confirm that your business is active, consistent and legitimate.
Five practical steps you can take today
1. Write content that directly answers real questions
AI tools mirror how people talk and ask things, so your content should match how customers phrase their questions. That means going beyond “here’s what we do” and writing pages that address the specific things your customers actually search for. A Cardiff accountant might write a clear page answering “what can I claim as a sole trader expense?” A local bathroom fitter could answer “how long does a bathroom installation take in the UK?”
Take your most important service and location pages and restructure them so the most useful answer appears near the top, not buried in paragraph five. Add a clear summary, sharpen your headings and make sure each page addresses a specific question rather than describing your business in general terms. AI systems extract answers, so give them something worth extracting.
2. Use structured data and schema markup
Research by SE Ranking found that 65% of pages cited by Google AI Mode and 71% of pages cited by ChatGPT include structured data. That’s a meaningful pattern. Schema markup is code added to your website that tells search engines and AI systems exactly what your content means, not just what it says.
For a service business, getting Organisation and LocalBusiness schema in place is a solid starting point. It’s worth being honest here, though: schema is foundational hygiene, not a citation multiplier on its own. Structured data provides the machine-readable layer that AI platforms need to understand your content, but it won’t guarantee citations by itself. It’s one piece of the puzzle, not the whole answer. Note that FAQPage rich results are no longer supported by Google for most businesses outside government and health, so concentrate your efforts on Organisation, LocalBusiness and Article schema first.
3. Keep your business information consistent across the web
Your business name, address, phone number and trading hours need to match exactly across your website, Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Yell, Checkatrade, industry directories and anywhere else you’re listed. AI systems cross-reference these sources to verify whether a business is real and reliable. If your information is missing or contradictory, AI simply skips you.
ChatGPT often relies on Bing data and other web results for local searches, so your visibility in Bing and a complete Bing Places listing can improve your chances of being mentioned. Most small businesses ignore Bing entirely. That’s worth revisiting.
4. Earn credible mentions and citations
AI engines don’t just look at your website in isolation. They look at what the rest of the internet says about you. Getting mentioned in local press, trade publications, community websites and relevant directories gives AI systems more corroborating evidence that you’re a trustworthy source.
Reviews matter too. For local-intent queries, active review management is critical to winning AI visibility. Encourage satisfied customers to leave genuine reviews and respond to them. It signals that your business is active and engaged, and there’s strong evidence that brands with healthy, well-maintained review profiles are considerably more likely to be cited in AI-generated answers than those with none.
5. Sort out the technical foundations of your website
Check your robots.txt file. Some security plugins and CDN settings block AI crawlers like GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended by default. If you want AI visibility, make sure you’re not locking the crawlers out. It’s a deliberate business decision, not something to leave to a plugin’s defaults.
Page speed, mobile performance, clean HTML structure and clear site navigation all affect how easily AI systems can read and understand your content. A slow, cluttered website built on a poor technical foundation is harder for both traditional search engines and AI to parse. Our web development work always includes these technical foundations because they underpin everything else you do to market your business online.
GEO builds on your existing SEO, not around it
There’s a temptation to treat GEO as a separate project, something you bolt on after you’ve done everything else. It isn’t. GEO values factual depth over keyword density, structured data over raw backlink volume, and content freshness. But the two disciplines are complementary: solid SEO foundations help AI crawlers discover your content, while GEO structuring helps AI models decide whether to cite it.
Put simply, if your website has thin content, a slow load time, poor internal linking and no credible backlinks, chasing AI citations before fixing those basics is wasted effort. The good news is that solid SEO strategy serves both purposes. A well-structured page that answers a question clearly, loads quickly and sits on an authoritative domain is exactly what both Google’s traditional algorithm and its AI Overview system are looking for.
Your search visibility in 2026 depends on three things: can search engines crawl and understand your content? Can AI engines extract direct, useful answers? And can generative engines trust your brand enough to mention or cite it? These aren’t three separate questions. They’re layers of the same question, and a good SEO strategy should be building towards all three.
How your website design affects AI visibility
This is something a lot of business owners don’t immediately connect. Semantic HTML, meaning using the right tags for headings, lists and paragraphs rather than styling everything with divs and custom classes, makes pages far easier for AI crawlers to interpret. A well-designed, well-built website uses clean markup, clear heading hierarchies and logical page structures that both humans and machines can navigate. These design and development decisions have direct consequences for how AI reads and represents your business.
Structured data acts as a translation layer between your content and AI systems. Rather than forcing AI to guess meaning through natural language processing alone, schema provides explicit signals about what your content represents. The quality of the underlying HTML matters just as much, though, so the two need to go hand in hand.
What to measure when rankings no longer tell the full story
Traditional SEO metrics like organic rankings, click-through rate and impressions don’t capture AI engine visibility. You need to start looking at different signals.
The most practical starting point is simply asking the engines directly. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google in separate windows and search for your services the way a customer would. “Reliable heating engineer in Newport” or “small business accountant Cardiff prices.” See what comes up, and see whether you’re in it.
In June 2026, Google added a generative AI performance report to Search Console, showing how often your pages appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode. If you haven’t checked your Search Console recently, that’s a good reason to do it today.
Over time, you can track what specialists call mention rate and citation rate: how often your brand name appears in AI-generated answers, and how often those answers include a link back to your site. These are things Google Analytics simply can’t measure, but there are specialist tools emerging that can. The strongest options cover multiple engines, measure share of voice and monitor citations across platforms.
Start with a simple audit
You don’t need to do everything at once. The most useful thing you can do this week is run a quick audit of where you actually stand. Search for your core services in your area using ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google. Check your Google Business Profile is complete and up to date. Pull up your website on your phone and ask yourself honestly whether it clearly answers the questions a customer would come with.
If the answer to any of those is “not really,” you’ve got a clear starting point. If you’d rather not tackle it alone, we work with small and medium businesses across the UK on exactly this kind of challenge, from search visibility strategy to the technical site work that underpins it. The businesses that act now, before AI search habits solidify, will have a real advantage over those who wait.