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Published 1 Nov 2026
A growth lead asked us recently: “Do we need an AI SEO strategy?” It is the right question with a misleading name. People are changing how they search. The way to be found has changed less than the headlines suggest. This article sets out what is actually different, what Google says about it, and what to do on your site this quarter.
How people search now: asking, not typing keywords
For twenty years, search meant typing two or three words and scanning a list of links. Increasingly it means asking a question in a full sentence, to a search engine with an AI summary at the top, or to an assistant that answers directly and cites a few sources.
Three things follow. Queries are longer and more specific: not “branding agency” but “which branding agencies work with fashion start-ups in the UK and what do they charge?”. Answers are synthesised, so a visitor may get what they need without clicking anything. And the assistant, not the visitor, chooses which sources to draw on and how to describe each one.
That last point is the real change. Your brand is now being summarised by software, for people who may never see your website. What the software says depends on what it can find and how consistent it is.
What Google actually says about AI Overviews and AI Mode
Google’s own guidance for site owners on its AI features is short and worth reading in full. The gist: there are no special requirements, no new markup, and no separate optimisation for AI Overviews or AI Mode. The same fundamentals that help a page appear in ordinary search help it appear in AI features. Pages need to be indexable and eligible to show as a snippet, and the long-standing advice on helpful, reliable, people-first content applies.
So the sensible reading is this. Anyone selling an “AI SEO” secret is selling something Google says does not exist. The work is unglamorous: a sound site, real answers, a clear brand. The difference is that it now matters more, because an assistant is less forgiving of ambiguity than a human skimming ten blue links.
Foundations first: crawlable, indexable, fast
Nothing else matters if the software cannot read your site. Check the basics before anything clever.
01 Crawlable. Your important pages are linked from somewhere, not hidden behind scripts, logins or infinite scroll. Your robots file is not accidentally blocking them. You have a sitemap and it is submitted in Search Console.
02 Indexable. Each page has one canonical address, a unique title and a description that says what it is. Content is in the HTML, not rendered only after the page loads. Pages you do not want found are marked as such; pages you do are not.
03 Fast and stable. Google’s Core Web Vitals measure loading, responsiveness and visual stability. Pass them on a phone. The usual culprits are oversized images, autoplaying video and scripts that load before the content.
If your site was built well, this is a morning’s audit. If it was not, it is the first thing to fix, and the Digital Design team should be involved; our Digital Design page sets out what a sound build includes.
Answer the questions your customers really ask
Assistants are looking for the clearest, most useful answer to a specific question. That favours pages written to answer a question properly over pages written to rank for a phrase.
Start with the questions. Your sales inbox, your support replies, your FAQs, the things people ask on a first call. Write each one down in the words the customer used. Then check: does a page on your site answer it, directly, in the first paragraph, with enough detail to be useful on its own?
Structure helps. A clear heading that is the question, a direct answer underneath, then the detail. Short paragraphs. Plain language. Facts an assistant can quote: what you do, who for, where, since when, how it works, what it costs or how pricing works. Vague pages that say “solutions” and “leverage” give the software nothing to repeat.
Avoid the temptation to generate hundreds of thin pages. Google’s guidance on helpful content is explicit that pages made primarily for search engines rather than people do worse over time, and the same logic applies to assistants: they are looking for the source worth citing, not the most pages.
Say one thing everywhere: why a clear brand helps assistants describe you
Here is the part most SEO advice misses. An assistant builds its picture of you from everything it can find: your site, your social profiles, directories, press, reviews, what others say about you. If those sources describe you five different ways, the summary is vague or wrong. If they all say the same thing, the summary is sharp.
This is a brand problem, and it has a brand solution. Decide what you are, in one sentence, and use that sentence everywhere: the site header, the about page, every social bio, the company description on directories, the boilerplate at the bottom of a press release. Use the same name, the same category, the same few words for what you do.
Our own line is “The Playbook for Digital Design, Brand Strategy and Growth Marketing”. It appears under the wordmark, in bios, in signatures. An assistant asked what Playbook does has one answer to find, repeated in many places. That is not a trick. It is consistency, and consistency is what software and people both reward. If you have not settled your sentence yet, Growth marketing for founder-led brands explains why brand comes first.
Measuring visibility when clicks fall
If assistants answer questions without sending a click, traffic from search may fall even as your visibility rises. Measuring on clicks alone will tell you the wrong story.
Watch a few other things. Impressions and average position in Search Console, which show whether you are being surfaced. Branded searches, which rise when people have heard of you elsewhere and come looking. Direct traffic and enquiries that mention “I asked an assistant” or “I read about you”. And the simplest check of all: ask the assistants yourself, once a month, the questions your customers ask, and note whether you appear and how you are described. Keep a log. It is crude, and it is the most direct measure there is.
A checklist for your site this quarter
01 Run a crawl and fix anything blocked, duplicated or missing a title.
02 Pass Core Web Vitals on the five pages that matter most, on a phone.
03 Write one sentence that says what you are. Put it on the site, every profile and every directory, identically.
04 List the twenty questions customers ask. Make sure each has a page, or a section, that answers it directly.
05 Rewrite the about page as facts an assistant could quote: what, who for, where, since when, how.
06 Remove or merge thin pages that exist only for search.
07 Start a monthly log: ask three assistants your customers’ questions and record what they say about you.
That is a quarter’s work for most small teams, and none of it will be wasted whatever search looks like next year. If you would like a second pair of eyes, we offer a search and AI visibility review as part of our growth work; Work with us explains how to ask for one, and our FAQs cover what happens next.
Assistants find brands the way people do: a site that works, answers worth quoting and one clear story told everywhere.
