How AI Search is Changing SEO for Small Businesses: AEO, GEO, and Agentic Search Explained
I’ve been in this industry since 1989, and I’ve watched search go from a curiosity to the single most important way that customers find businesses.
I’ve seen the ground shift before: the move to mobile, the arrival of pay-per-click, and every Panda and Penguin update Google could throw at us.
What’s happening with AI search right now is bigger than all of it, and understanding how AI search is changing SEO for small businesses has never been more urgent.
The Lowdown
- Google is no longer the only place your customers ask questions: ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity are all in the mix now.
- Ranking well and being recommended by AI aren’t the same thing: the overlap between the two has collapsed dramatically.
- Your traffic can drop even when your rankings haven’t: AI Overviews answer the question on the page before anyone clicks through.
- SEO is still the foundation: AEO, GEO and agentic search are all built on it, not replacements for it. Think tweaks, not reinventing the wheel.
- Smaller businesses have a real window right now: you can adapt in weeks, a national brand can’t.
Want Support Developing an AI-Friendly Search Strategy?
One2create offers a free, no-obligation consultation to find out where the gaps are in your AI search optimisation and what to do about them. Get in touch today to find out more.
Why I’m Not Writing Another ‘AI is Coming’ Think Piece
Over the past few years I’ve spent a lot of time looking at how people actually find businesses online, not how we presume they do.
The numbers have changed enough that any business owner still planning the year around Google ranking alone is falling behind.
That’s not because Google is finished; it isn’t. But the places your customers ask their questions have multiplied, and the way those questions get answered has fundamentally changed.
AEO, GEO, Agentic Search: What Do They All Actually Mean?
There’s a lot of jargon flying around this subject, so let me cut through it. AI search is an umbrella term. Underneath it, there are a few more specific terms you’re going to start heating more of.
AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation)
This is about being the source that directly answers a question. When someone asks ChatGPT “what’s the best way to do X?”, AEO is the work that gets your content selected as the answer. It’s a bit like winning the snippet, but for AI engines rather than Google.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation)
This one is about being cited and recommended inside AI-generated responses. Where AEO is about being the answer, GEO is focused on being mentioned and trusted within a broader response. If an AI is writing a summary about your industry and your business gets named as a recommended provider, that’s GEO working.
Agentic Search
This is the newest and potentially most significant shift. It’s what happens when a customer doesn’t search themselves but asks an AI agent to go away, research the options, and come back with a shortlist. The agent reads your site, weighs up credibility, and makes its own judgement. If you don’t make the cut, a human will never even see your site.
These aren’t separate from SEO.
Perhaps the most important lesson to take from this is that AEO, GEO, and Agentic Search aren’t replacements for SEO; they’re built on it. If you’re asking how to get found in AI search results, then the work that’s always made good SEO (things like clear structure, clean technical foundations, plainly stated facts, and trusted references) is exactly the work that decides if you show up in an AI answer.
Is AI Taking Search Away from Google?
To an extent yes, but not in the way people think.
Google hasn’t collapsed. It still handles the overwhelming majority of search activity. But a large and growing share of the questions people used to type into google are now being asked somewhere else entirely.
The clearest signal of this is the rise of AI assistants as destinations in their own right.
AI platforms now generate about 45 billion sessions a month worldwide, and that’s a category that barely existed a few years ago. ChatGPT had roughly 87% of the AI assistant market twelve months ago. By January 2026 that had fallen to around 68%, with Gemini nearly quadrupling its share in the same period. Perplexity (the research-focused engine) has grown 370% year on year.
What businesses should do about AI overviews in search
The practical point for businesses is that your customers are no longer all in one place. They’re spread across Google, ChatGPT, Gemini, and a handful of others. And each one decides who to recommend based on its own logic. That means every aspect of your strategy has to be flexible, smart, and user-focused.
What’s Happening Inside Google Itself?
The Zero Click Search Impact on Website Traffic
Google is becoming more like an AI assistant which changes the value of the top ranking.
The mechanism is AI overviews: the AI generated summaries that sit above the traditional blue links. They appeared on more than 25% of all Google searches by early 2026, up from about 13% the year before.
When an AI overview appears, it changes behaviour sharply. A study found that the organic click-through rate dropped from 1.76% to 0.61% when an AI overview was present. This is the zero-click search impact on website traffic that most dashboards just aren’t set up to catch.
That means you can hold exactly the same ranking you had last year and still lose half your clicks from it.
Google is now answering the question on the page before anyone needs to visit your site. Around 60% of Google searches already end without a single click. For searches that trigger AI overviews, that number is higher still.
But the traffic hasn’t vanished; it’s just being served as an answer rather than a visit.
Why Does Ranking Number One Matter Less Than it Used To?
Because ranking highly and being cited by AI aren’t the same thing.
You’d assume that if you’re in the top ten on Google, you’d naturally be the source the AI summary quotes from. But that isn’t necessarily true. The overlap between top-ten Google rankings and the sources cited in AI overviews collapsed from around 75% in mid-2025 to between 17% and 38% by early 2026.
In other words, the businesses being recommended inside AI answers increasingly aren’t the same businesses sitting at the top of the old rankings. A different set of signals is now deciding who gets surfaced.
But how do you measure success if clicks are falling?
The zero-click search impact on website traffic is definitely real, but it’s not game over for your business.
The most important thing is to stop treating sessions from Google as the only number that matters and start tracking your visibility inside AI answers.
The old dashboard centred exclusively on organic traffic and rankings can hide the real story. If your impressions are steady but your clicks are sliding, that’s the signature of zero-click search, not a failing website.
The metrics worth adding are things like share of voice in AI answers (that’s how often you’re cited across the main engines for your key questions) and branded search volume, which is a useful proxy for whether AI-driven awareness is feeding through.
There’s a quality effect working in your favour here too. The visits that do arrive from AI-mediated search tend to convert better because the person has already done their reading and arrives further along in their decision.
So it’s fewer clicks, but warmer ones.
Does This Hit Smaller Businesses Harder Than Big Brands?
This is one of the most common questions I get from clients: how is AI search changing SEO for small businesses specifically?
In the short term, yes, it can be a challenge. But it also hands smaller businesses an advantage.
Large brands carry their own gravity. Ask any AI assistant for the best running shoe, and the household names appear. That’s because they’re already woven through the web and the data these models learn from.
A regional or mid-sized business doesn’t have that pull. It relies on showing up at the moment someone is actually looking, and that moment is what’s shifting.
The advantage for smaller businesses is speed.
A small or mid-sized business can adapt its content, its structure, and its presence in a matter of weeks. A national or multinational brand with layers of sign-off simply can’t. This is a situation where being nimble beats being big.
My Honest Take
Google isn’t going anywhere; it’s the shape of the search that’s changing. And it’s changing underneath us while most marketing plans carry on like it’s 2022.
The businesses that win the next three years won’t be the ones with the biggest ad budget. They’ll be the ones who understand how AI search is changing SEO for small businesses and who built a presence and who started while it was still cheap to do so.
The good news is that none of this is a mystery.
The signals are knowable, and the work is doable. It just takes a willingness to look honestly at how your business currently shows up (or doesn’t) across Google and AI assistants and then act on what you find.
Wondering How to Get Found in AI Search Results?
If you want a second pair of eyes on how your business shows up across Google and the AI assistants, that’s exactly the conversation we’re having with clients right now.
One2create offers a free no-obligation consultation. We look at how you currently appear, where the gaps are, and what the highest impact moves would be for your business. The earlier you start, the cheaper the lesson.
Get in touch today and let’s talk about your AI search strategy.
FAQs
How is AI search changing SEO for small businesses?
AI search means your customers are no longer all on Google. They’re asking questions across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity too. For small businesses, the good news is that the same SEO fundamentals that drive Google rankings also determine how you show up in AI answers.
What is zero-click search and how does it affect my website traffic?
Zero-click search is when Google answers a query on the results page, so nobody clicks through to your site. Around 60% of Google searches now end this way. If your traffic is falling despite stable rankings, zero-click search driven largely by AI Overviews is almost certainly why.
What should businesses do about AI Overviews in search?
Don’t panic, but don’t ignore them either. Identify which of your key commercial keywords now trigger an AI Overview and adjust your expectations for clicks there. Shift focus towards structured content, schema markup and third-party citations, which is what AI Overviews pull from.
How do I get found in AI search results in the UK?
Start by asking ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity the questions your customers would ask, and see who gets recommended. If it isn’t you, the fix is the same as good SEO: clear on-page content, structured data, and credible references from sources the AI engines already trust.
