Open Google and search for the thing your business sells. Read what sits at the top of the page. Then ask yourself how many of those people ever needed to visit anybody's website at all.
That is the whole change, and it has happened quietly enough that plenty of business owners have not looked.
What Actually Changed on the Results Page
Two things, both from Google.
The first is AI Overviews, the generated summary that now sits above the ordinary blue links for a large share of questions. It answers, in place, using material drawn from pages like yours.
The second is AI Mode, which is a separate, conversational way to search rather than a box on the results page. Google began rolling it out in Canada, in English, on 21 August 2025 (sourced from Google Canada). Google describes it as using a "query fan-out technique" that breaks your question into subtopics and runs several searches at once, and says early users are asking questions two to three times longer than a traditional search query.
That last detail is worth sitting with. If people are typing longer, more specific questions, the short generic phrases most websites were built around are not what is being asked any more. "Plumber Burnaby" is becoming "who fixes a leaking shower valve in a 1970s condo without opening the wall".
The Part That Should Worry You
Pew Research Center tracked the actual browsing of 900 US adults across 68,879 Google searches during March 2025. When an AI summary appeared, 8% of visits included a click on a traditional search result. When no summary appeared, 15% did. Clicks on a link inside the summary itself came to 1% (sourced from Pew Research Center).
They also found people were likelier to simply stop. Sessions ended entirely on 26% of visits where a summary was present, against 16% where it was not.
Two caveats I would rather state than bury. That is a US sample, and it ran in March 2025, which is a long time ago in this particular subject. Treat the exact percentages as a snapshot rather than today's number. What I can tell you is that the direction has not reversed.
And it is not only Google. Forty-five percent of consumers now say they use ChatGPT or generative AI for business recommendations (sourced from BrightLocal). Some share of the people who would once have found you through a search are now asking a chatbot who to call.
What Google Actually Says You Should Do
Here is where the advice you are currently being sold and the documentation part company.
There is a whole industry that has appeared in the last eighteen months selling AI SEO packages. Answer engine optimisation, generative engine optimisation, large language model optimisation, and special files you are told to place on your server so the models can read you properly.
Google's own documentation on AI features says this: "There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary." On the files specifically, it says "You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features. There's also no special schema.org structured data that you need to add" (sourced from Google Search Central).
I would not spend a dollar on an AI SEO package until whoever is selling it can explain why Google's own guidance says the thing they are selling is unnecessary. That is not a rhetorical trap. There may be a good answer. Ask for it.
The genuinely uncomfortable version of this is not that AI broke search engine optimisation. It is that the work which gets you into AI results is the work most businesses were already avoiding. Pages that answer a real question properly. A site that loads. Content specific enough to be worth quoting rather than generic enough to be interchangeable.
Where AI Helps You, and Where It Buries You
Google does not ban content written with AI. It bans a specific behaviour, and the distinction is worth getting right because a lot of people have the wrong end of it.
The spam policies name scaled content abuse, and describe it as "using generative AI tools or other similar tools to generate many pages without adding value for users." The policy adds that the problem is "creating large amounts of unoriginal content that provides little to no value to users, no matter how it's created" (sourced from Google Search Central).
Read that last clause again. No matter how it's created. The tool is not the offence. Volume without value is, and a human can commit it just as easily.
So, genuinely useful:
A first draft you then rewrite in your own voice, on a subject you already know
Turning a messy brain-dump of your own expertise into an outline
Rewriting a page you wrote years ago into plainer language
Drafting answers to the questions customers actually ask you, which you then correct
Reliably counterproductive:
Publishing twelve articles a month that nobody asked for, on topics you have no particular view about
Generating one page per neighbourhood with the place name swapped, which was a bad idea before AI made it fast
Anything you would not put your own name to in front of a customer
The test I use is embarrassment. If you would be uncomfortable for a customer to learn that a page was generated and published without anyone reading it, do not publish it.
What to Do This Month
None of the following is new advice. That is precisely the point.
Answer the questions you actually get asked. Write down the ten questions customers ask you on the phone and answer each one properly on your site. This is the single highest-return thing available, and it happens to be exactly what a generated answer draws on. The piece on where your Google Q&A answers went covers why a page you own is the durable home for them.
Check whether you show up at all. Before worrying about being quoted by an AI, confirm you are visible in ordinary search. The five signs your business is invisible on Google is a faster diagnosis than any AI audit you will be sold.
Make the page load. Nothing about AI changed this, and a slow page is still the cheapest fix on most sites.
Keep your Google Business Profile current. For local searches it is still doing more work than your website is.
Watch impressions against clicks in Search Console. If impressions hold steady while clicks fall, you are being read and not visited. That is the pattern to catch early, and it is free to monitor.
That last one is the closest thing to an AI dashboard you actually need. You do not have to guess whether this is affecting you. The data is sitting in an account you already have.
The Honest Summary
Fewer people will click through to your website than did two years ago, and no tactic reverses that. What you still control is whether you are the business being summarised, and whether the people who do click find something worth the visit. That has always been the job. It is just less forgiving now.
So: what is the question your customers ask you most often, and is the answer anywhere on your website?