A growing share of customers are no longer typing a search into Google and clicking through to a website. They are asking ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google’s AI Overviews a question and acting on whatever answer comes back.
Google searches ended without a click 68% of the time in the US during the first four months of 2026, according to research from SparkToro. That figure has risen sharply as AI-generated answers take over more of the results page. For businesses, it means the customer has often already decided what they want and who provides it before they ever visit a website.
If a brand is not the one being recommended in that moment, it is invisible to a customer who is ready to act.
Why this matters more than most businesses realise
Traditional search sent a person to a list of ten blue links, and they chose. AI search skips that step. The tool reads the available information, decides what it trusts, and gives one answer – sometimes with two or three options, rarely with ten.
That means the competition is not for a ranking position anymore. It is for being the answer, or being named inside it. Pew Research found that only around 1% of visits included a click on a source cited inside an AI summary – the answer itself is doing almost all of the work that a search result used to do. A business that used to appear on page one of Google can be completely absent from an AI-generated recommendation, with no indication anywhere that this is happening.
What AI tools actually look for
Generative Engine Optimisation, or GEO, is the practice of structuring a brand’s online presence so AI tools can find, trust and cite it. It is a different discipline to traditional SEO, though the two overlap.
According to Uprise Media, a UK consultancy specialising in AI search visibility, AI tools weigh a combination of signals when deciding who to recommend:
- Clear, consistent entity information. The AI needs to understand exactly who a business is, what it does, and where it operates. If the business name, description and details are inconsistent across the website, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn and industry directories, the AI has a harder time building confidence in what it knows.
- Structured, specific content. Vague marketing copy gives AI tools nothing to extract. Content that states specifics clearly – what the business does, who it serves, what results it delivers – is far more likely to be pulled into an answer than content written to sound impressive.
- Third-party validation. AI tools lean heavily on external sources rather than trusting a brand’s own claims about itself. Reviews, press coverage, industry directory listings and mentions on reputable sites all build the kind of trust signal that gets a brand included in a recommendation.
- Direct answers to real questions. Content structured as a clear question followed by a direct, specific answer performs significantly better than long, unstructured prose. AI tools are built to extract answers, not read essays.
Practical steps to improve AI visibility
- Audit how the brand currently shows up. Ask ChatGPT and Perplexity the kinds of questions a customer might ask about the category – “best [service] in [location]”, “who should I use for [service]”. Check whether the business appears, and if it does, whether the information is accurate. This alone often reveals problems most businesses do not know they have.
- Fix inconsistent entity information. Business name, description and key facts should be identical across the website, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn and any directories the business appears in. Inconsistency confuses AI tools and weakens confidence in what they know.
- Add structured content to the website. Frequently asked questions, clear service descriptions and specific case studies with real numbers all give AI tools something concrete to extract. A page that answers “what does [service] cost” or “how do I choose a [service provider]” directly is far more citable than a generic services page.
- Build genuine third-party citations. This means reviews on Google, Trustpilot or industry-specific platforms, coverage in relevant publications, and inclusion in “best of” lists within the category. Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands and found that brand mentions across the web correlate three times more strongly with AI visibility than backlinks do – being talked about elsewhere matters more to AI tools than any amount of work on a brand’s own website.
- Be specific, not impressive. AI tools reward clarity over polish. A sentence that says exactly what a business does and who it does it for beats a paragraph of marketing language every time.
This is not a one-off fix
AI visibility compounds over time. The more consistent, structured and well-cited a brand’s online presence becomes, the more confidently AI tools recommend it – and that confidence builds month on month rather than resetting.
The businesses treating this seriously now are building a lead that will be harder to close later, as AI search accounts for a larger share of how customers find and choose who to work with.
