SEO in the Age of AI

How Google AI Overviews Are Changing Search Results

Google launched AI Overviews in the UK in August 2024, fundamentally changing how search results appear for British users. These AI-generated summaries now appear for 15-30% of all Google queries, presenting synthesised information directly in search results rather than simply listing links to websites. For UK businesses, this represents both a significant threat to traditional traffic sources and an opportunity for those who adapt their content strategy.

Google selects sources for AI Overviews using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), pulling fresh web content rather than relying solely on pre-trained knowledge. The algorithm averages five URL citations per AI Overview, with pages ranking in position one appearing more than 50% of the time. Critically, 97% of all AI Overview citations come from pages already ranking in the top 20 organic results—meaning traditional SEO excellence remains the foundation for AI visibility. Whitehat SEO's comprehensive SEO services help UK businesses build this essential foundation.

Google's March 2024 Core Update: A Turning Point

Google's March 2024 core update represented the most significant algorithm change in years, running for 45 days and reducing low-quality content in search results by 45%. The update integrated the Helpful Content System directly into Google's core algorithm, making content quality assessment more sophisticated and immediate. Three new spam policies were introduced targeting scaled content abuse, site reputation abuse, and expired domain abuse—all directly relevant to how businesses approach AI-assisted content creation.

Elizabeth Tucker, Google's Director of Product Management, stated that these updates would reduce low-quality content and send more traffic to helpful, high-quality sites. For UK businesses creating content with AI assistance, this clarifies the approach required: AI tools can support content creation, but the output must demonstrate genuine expertise, provide unique value, and serve readers rather than algorithms. Understanding the history of SEO helps predict where these changes are heading next.

E-E-A-T: Why Experience Now Matters More Than Ever

Google added "Experience" to its quality guidelines in December 2022, transforming E-A-T into E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. This addition reflects Google's recognition that first-hand knowledge provides unique value that AI cannot replicate. The term appears 116 times in Google's Quality Rater Guidelines, signalling its importance to content evaluation.

Experience is evaluated through evidence of first-hand involvement: original photographs, videos demonstrating actual product usage, personal anecdotes showing practical knowledge, and an author's documented track record with the topic. Google specifically looks for content showing "actual use of a product, having actually visited a place"—signals that distinguish human-created content from AI-generated material that lacks real-world interaction.

For UK businesses, demonstrating E-E-A-T requires strategic investment in author credentials, original research, and content that showcases genuine expertise. Whitehat SEO's approach to ethical white hat SEO aligns directly with Google's E-E-A-T requirements—building sustainable visibility through authentic expertise rather than manipulation. Google's Gary Illyes confirmed this approach works for AI visibility too: "To get your content to appear in AI Overview, simply use normal SEO practices."

ChatGPT, Perplexity, and the New Search Landscape

ChatGPT has become a genuine search competitor, with 800 million weekly active users as of June 2025—doubling from 400 million in February 2025. The platform receives 5.8 billion monthly website visits, and its search market share has grown 740% in just 12 months, from 0.25% to 2.1%. While still a fraction of Google's dominance, the trajectory is unmistakable: 92% of Fortune 500 companies now use ChatGPT, and consumer behaviour is shifting rapidly.

Perplexity has emerged as a serious contender in the AI search space, with 22 million monthly active users processing 780 million queries monthly—a 239% increase from August 2024. The platform's valuation has skyrocketed from $520 million in January 2024 to $18-20 billion, reflecting investor confidence in the AI search paradigm. Perplexity averages five or more citations per answer, creating significant opportunities for brands that optimise for AI extraction.

User Behaviour Has Already Shifted

Research from Eight Oh Two in January 2026 found that 37% of consumers now start their searches with AI tools instead of Google, with 60% saying AI delivers better, clearer answers than traditional search. Google's global market share dipped below 90% for the first time since 2015 in October 2024, and 26% of consumers didn't use Google at all for their last product purchase. The generational divide is stark: 82% of Gen Z (ages 18-26) use AI search tools regularly, while Baby Boomers (ages 59-76) remain most loyal to traditional search at 45% AI usage.

This shift has profound implications for UK businesses. Traditional SEO focused on ranking high so people would click through to your website. AI search engines select, synthesise, and recommend—the user may never visit your site at all, but your brand either gets mentioned in the AI response or it doesn't exist in that conversation. Whitehat SEO's integrated SEO and AEO strategy ensures UK businesses achieve visibility across both traditional and AI-powered search platforms.

Answer Engine Optimisation: The New SEO Discipline

Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) is the practice of structuring content so AI systems can find, understand, and cite your information in their responses. Related to this is Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), a term first defined by Princeton University researchers in November 2023, which focuses specifically on optimising visibility in generative AI responses. Both represent essential skills for UK marketers in 2026 and beyond.

The Princeton GEO study, published at the ACM SIGKDD 2024 conference, provides critical data for optimisation strategies. GEO methods can boost visibility by up to 40% in AI responses. The most effective strategies identified were adding statistics (40% visibility improvement) and including citations and quotations (also 40% improvement). Authoritative language proved particularly effective for historical content. Crucially, lower-ranked websites benefited most from GEO techniques, with some seeing up to 115% visibility increases—suggesting that smaller UK businesses can compete effectively in AI search even without dominant domain authority.

Traditional keyword stuffing actually performs 10% worse than baseline in AI visibility—a critical finding for businesses still using outdated optimisation techniques. The key is creating genuinely helpful content structured for easy extraction, with your brand name embedded in quotable passages. For practical implementation guidance, Whitehat SEO's comprehensive guide on optimising content for AI search provides step-by-step instructions.

Using AI for Content Creation: Google's Guidelines

Google's official stance on AI-generated content is clear and pragmatic. As stated in Google Search Central documentation: "Appropriate use of AI or automation is not against our guidelines. Using AI doesn't give content any special gains. It's just content. If it is useful, helpful, original, and satisfies aspects of E-E-A-T, it might do well in Search." The focus is entirely on quality and value, regardless of how content is created.

What Google penalises—following the March 2024 spam policies—is scaled content abuse: mass-produced content created primarily to manipulate search rankings rather than help users. AI-generated content without human oversight that fails quality standards will struggle to rank. The determining factor is whether content demonstrates E-E-A-T regardless of creation method, not whether AI was involved in the process.

Recommended Approaches for AI-Assisted Content

Effective AI use in content marketing includes research and ideation support, outline and structure development, grammar and style refinement, content optimisation suggestions, and draft generation for human enhancement. Critical requirements include always having human expert review, adding original insights and first-hand experience, disclosing AI usage where readers would expect transparency, focusing on E-E-A-T signals including author credentials and citations, and fact-checking all AI-generated claims.

According to HubSpot's 2025 AI Trends for Marketers report, 66% of marketers now use AI, with 98% planning to maintain or increase AI investment. The businesses seeing the best results are those using AI to augment human expertise rather than replace it—creating more content faster while maintaining the authentic voice and genuine insights that both readers and search algorithms reward. Whitehat SEO helps clients integrate AI tools effectively into their evolving content strategy without sacrificing quality.

Technical SEO for AI Visibility

Technical implementation has become increasingly important for AI search visibility. AI platforms use dedicated crawlers to index content, and your website must explicitly allow access. GPTBot (OpenAI), Google-Extended (Gemini), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), and PerplexityBot all require consideration in your robots.txt configuration. According to Cloudflare research, AI crawler traffic rose 18% year-over-year in 2025, with GPTBot alone growing 305% in request volume.

Schema Markup for AI Understanding

Structured data helps AI systems understand your content's context and authority. The most important schema types for UK businesses in 2026 include Article schema (for blog posts and news, enabling rich results and Google News visibility), Organisation schema (for brand identity, enabling knowledge panels and entity recognition), and Product schema (for e-commerce, enabling shopping results). Note that Google deprecated HowTo schema in August 2023 and significantly limited FAQ schema to authoritative government and health sites only—though implementing FAQ schema can still help AI systems understand your content structure even without rich results.

Core Web Vitals: The Foundation

Core Web Vitals remain essential for both traditional and AI search visibility. Current metrics include LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) measuring loading performance with a target under 2.5 seconds, INP (Interaction to Next Paint) measuring responsiveness with a target under 200 milliseconds, and CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) measuring visual stability with a target under 0.1. Importantly, INP replaced First Input Delay (FID) in March 2024, measuring all interactions throughout a page visit rather than just the first one.

A strategic recommendation for most UK businesses: block AI training crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot) while allowing search crawlers (OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot). Additionally, submit sitemaps to both Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools—critical for ChatGPT visibility since it uses Bing's index. Whitehat SEO's on-page SEO best practices guide covers technical implementation in detail.

What UK Businesses Should Do Now

The trajectory is clear. Gartner predicts that 70% of all queries will be influenced by generative engines by the end of 2025, with 25% of organic traffic going directly to AI chatbots. By 2026, 40% of enterprise applications will have task-specific AI agents (up from 5%). By 2028, an estimated 90% of B2B buying decisions will be AI agent-intermediated. The Reuters Institute reports that organic search traffic to publishers has already declined 33% year-over-year.

The Lumar SEO Industry Survey reveals that 81% of SEOs rank GEO/AEO/AI Search Optimisation in their top three priority skills for 2026. Other critical capabilities include entity and semantic SEO, data analysis for understanding zero-click behaviour, multi-platform optimisation spanning YouTube, TikTok, and Reddit, and brand authority building across the web. UK businesses implementing AI optimisation strategies today are seeing returns of 200-500% within 18-24 months—as detailed in Whitehat SEO's guide to AI search optimisation for UK businesses.

Frequently Asked Questions

The Future of Search Is Here

AI search isn't a future trend—it's the current reality for 800 million weekly users and growing. The businesses that adapt their SEO strategy now will capture the high-intent traffic and conversion advantages that AI visibility delivers. Those waiting for "proof" will find themselves competing against entrenched competitors who moved early.

Whitehat SEO's integrated approach combines traditional search engine optimisation with Answer Engine Optimisation, helping UK businesses achieve visibility wherever their customers are searching. As a HubSpot Diamond Solutions Partner with over a decade of experience in ethical SEO, we understand that sustainable results require genuine expertise, quality content, and technical excellence—exactly what both Google and AI systems reward.

References & Sources

1. Google Blog - AI in Search: Going beyond information to intelligence (May 2025)
2. Google Search Central - Google Search's guidance about AI-generated content
3. Semrush - AI Overviews Study: What 2025 SEO Data Tells Us (December 2025)
4. Princeton University - GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (ACM SIGKDD 2024)
5. SparkToro - 2024 Zero-Click Search Study (July 2024)
6. DemandSage - ChatGPT Statistics (January 2026)
7. Cloudflare - From Googlebot to GPTBot: Who's Crawling Your Site in 2025
8. BrightEdge - One Year Into Google AI Overviews (May 2025)
9. HubSpot - 2025 AI Trends for Marketers
10. Search Engine Land - Generative Engine Optimization framework introduced