Two Questions Every Business Owner is Asking about Google AI

24 May

How do you get your business into a Google AI Overview — and how do you control what it says about you? Here’s the plain-English answer.

There are two questions on the minds of marketers and business owners in 2026, and they come up in nearly every conversation I have:

→ How do you get your business to appear in a Google AI Overview?

→ How do you control what a Google AI search says about your business?

These questions matter because Google is still the most-used search platform by a wide margin. It handles around 13–14 billion searches a day — roughly 300% to 400% more than ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity combined. If your customers are searching, the odds are overwhelming that they’re doing it on Google.

PART ONE

How to Appear in a Google AI Overview

Last week Google announced its new advanced model capabilities for Search. I listened to the accompanying blog post written by Elizabeth Reid, Vice President of Google Search — though “listened to” gives the wrong impression. It was read out by a flat, robotic text-to-speech voice. So impersonal.

Alongside the announcement, Google published guidance on its website for developers, setting out the technical steps for configuring a website so it feeds Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode. (If AI Mode is something you haven’t heard of before, it’s the feature that lets you ask a question and then keep asking follow-up questions.)

For business owners, this matters — not because you need to understand the technical requirements yourself, but because you need to make sure your marketer or website manager does.

PART TWO

The Plain English Snapshot

Here’s everything in Google’s guidance, stripped of the jargon and boiled down to what actually affects your business:

1. Write for people, not machines. Keep it clear and easy to follow, with headings, and good photos or video where they genuinely help.

2. It’s fine to use AI to help you write. As long as the end result is good quality and not spammy, using AI as a writing aid is perfectly acceptable.

3. Genuinely useful content matters most. This counts more than anything else. Generic content that anyone could have written gets ignored; content based on your real experience and know-how is what stands out.

4. Keep your website working properly. Google can only use your content if it can read it. Make sure pages load reasonably fast, work well on phones, aren’t blocked, and you’re not running lots of duplicate pages.

5. For local businesses and shops. Keep your Google Business Profile and product details up to date and accurate, because AI answers can show this information directly.

6. Keep an eye on AI assistants. Tools that can browse websites and book things for people are starting to appear. Worth knowing about, but not urgent.

7. Getting found in AI answers is just normal SEO. Google’s AI answers pull from regular search results, so the work that gets you found on Google is the same work that gets you into AI answers. Fancy terms like “AEO” and “GEO” are just SEO with a new name.

8. Ignore the “AI hacks.” You don’t need special AI files, you don’t need to chop content into tiny pieces, you don’t need to write in a special “AI style,” and don’t chase fake mentions of your business around the web.

The bottom line: do solid, normal SEO, focus on content that genuinely helps people and reflects what you actually know, ignore the hype, and keep your business details current.

One caveat: because this is focused exclusively on Google, it downplays the strategies you can use to be found on other AI search platforms like ChatGPT. Specifically, specialists still see Answer Engine Optimisation and Generative Engine Optimisation as solid strategies for use across all AI generative search.

PART THREE

So — What Will You Do About It?

By far the most common question new clients ask me is some version of “how do I get more people to notice my business?”

Taking ownership of your digital presence has to be the top marketing priority for any business serious about thriving in a soft economy. So here’s my challenge to you: do something about it today, because you can be sure your competitors already are.

It needn’t be complicated. Send a quick email to your marketer asking, “Hey, what are we doing about AI generative search?”