A customer no longer opens Google and types “plumber” plus their town. They open ChatGPT and ask: “Who can replace a boiler for me this week, and roughly what does it cost?” They get a paragraph of text, three suggested companies and no blue links. If you aren’t in that paragraph, you simply don’t exist for that customer — and you will never see that you lost them, because nothing happened in your analytics.
What has really changed (and what hasn’t)
First, calmly: Google isn’t dead. It still handles the overwhelming majority of searches across Europe, with Bing a distant second. Anyone selling you the idea that classic SEO is an obsolete tool is selling you something else.
What has changed is less comfortable: searches increasingly end without a click. In March 2025 the Pew Research Center tracked the actual browsing of 900 people and found that users who were shown a Google AI summary clicked through to a result in 8 % of cases — those without a summary did so in 15 %. Clicks on the sources cited inside the summary itself were extremely rare.
Translated into plain terms: more impressions, fewer visits. Your job is no longer only to reach the first page, but to get into the answer itself.
How AI decides who to mention
It helps to look at data rather than guesswork here. In March 2026 Ahrefs analysed 863,000 searches and four million links from Google AI summaries. Only around 38 % of the cited pages also ranked in the top ten organic results. Roughly a third of the cited pages weren’t even in the top hundred.
That means two things. First: ranking well in Google still helps a great deal, but it isn’t a ticket in. Second: the model breaks the question into several sub-questions and collects sources from searches quite different from the one the customer typed.
A second Ahrefs study, covering 75,000 brands, compared which factors correlate most with mentions in ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and AI summaries. The strongest performer was mentions of the company name elsewhere on the web — that is, somebody writing about you — rather than the number of pages on your own site. Between page count and visibility in AI answers there was effectively no relationship.
Which is bad news for a lot of people, since “let’s write another fifty articles” is considerably easier than “let’s make sure somebody mentions us”.
So what actually helps a small company
Answer the question immediately, in the first paragraph
A language model doesn’t read your page with enthusiasm. It looks for the passage that directly answers the question and summarises it. If your air conditioning servicing page opens with “Company X has been providing comprehensive solutions for over 20 years…”, you have just offered a paragraph that answers nothing. Start with the answer; the background comes after.
Be specific where your competitors are vague
Price ranges, the area you cover, response times, what is included and what isn’t, which services you don’t provide. Models like statements they can verify and cite. “Competitive prices” isn’t a statement, it is filler.
Make sure somebody mentions you
This isn’t about buying links. It is about ordinary things: local media, trade associations, a supplier’s list of approved installers, forums where your name comes up in conversation, an episode of a podcast forty people listen to. If there is no trace of you on the web, the model has nothing to infer from.
One page, one topic
A “Services” page listing fourteen activities as bullet points is as useful to an AI as a business card with no text. Every service you want to sell deserves its own page with its own heading and its own detail.
Make the content readable by a machine too
Sensible headings, tables instead of pictures of tables, text in HTML rather than in a PDF or inside an image, structured data for the company and the products. None of that is new — it is simply more important than it was.
What not to pay for
There have been so many “GEO optimisation” offers in the past year that it is hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. A few rules we apply ourselves when judging other people’s proposals:
- “Guaranteed mention in ChatGPT.” Nobody can guarantee that. Answers change from day to day and from user to user.
- An llms.txt file as a magic solution. The proposal exists, and we use it on our own sites because it costs us nothing. That any of it lifts visibility is, so far, unevidenced. Anyone selling it as a service for a few hundred euros is selling hope.
- A hundred AI-generated articles a month. Look at the data above: page count barely correlates with visibility in AI answers. It can, however, damage your standing with the people who actually read the text.
- Old SEO with a new name. If an “AI optimisation” proposal contains exactly the same items as an SEO proposal from three years ago, just with a different cover, it is fair to ask about that out loud.
How do you even know whether it is working
Measurement is the weakest link here for now, and anyone claiming otherwise is overstating. What you realistically can do:
- Once a month, ask five to ten questions yourself that your customer would ask, and write down who gets mentioned. A table in a spreadsheet, ten minutes. Not science, but better than nothing.
- In analytics, watch visits from sources such as chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and gemini.google.com. The numbers will be small, but those people are worth looking at — they often arrive more decided than people from search.
- Don’t stop tracking classic rankings. At least 38 % of the reasons an AI cites you are still hiding in the top ten results.
To sum up without dressing it up: in practice, optimising for AI answers is largely good old hygiene — clear structure, concrete content, a fast site, a tidy business profile — plus a serious effort to get mentioned somewhere other than your own site. None of that will look spectacular in a presentation. It does work.
How we approach it is on the AI search and SEO and visibility pages, and the prices are published openly in the SEO and AI price list. If you want to know where your site stands today, write through the contact form or call +386 40 529 425 — we will also say so when we think investing doesn’t make sense for you yet.