For twenty years, being found online followed a familiar pattern: rank on the first page, get clicked, win the enquiry. That pattern is now shifting.
A growing share of searches ends with an AI-generated answer rather than a list of links – Google’s AI Overviews summarise results directly, while assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity are increasingly used to ask for recommendations in plain language.
For national brands, this is a content problem. For local businesses, it is something more fundamental: when someone asks an assistant for a good electrician nearby, the answer is assembled from whatever information about local businesses the model can find and trust. Being visible now means being the business that information points to.
From ranking to being cited
The practical difference is between ranking and being cited. Traditional SEO aimed to place a page as high as possible, so a person would click on it. AI-driven discovery works differently: the assistant reads across multiple sources and produces a single, summarised answer, often naming only two or three businesses.
That compresses the shortlist considerably. Where a searcher might once have scrolled past ten results and formed their own view, they may now be handed out three names and a short reason for each. Getting that set is the new objective, and it depends less on a single optimised page than on the overall picture of your business across the web.
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