By
Nick Pitt
The new Google AI model is expected to have a significant impact on organic search results. To ensure your website remains visible and effective, here is a guide for businesses to optimise their sites within Google.
Since AI requires quick access to data, it’s essential to include clear and concise information. Features such as Q&A sections on webpages can help the AI understand content better and make more appropriate decisions. If your content is ambiguous or unclear, it may take longer for the AI to assess, and your site’s visibility could be affected.
In essence, your website should be presented in its simplest form — with bullet points and shorter paragraphs for easy consumption. The websites we develop and manage are already designed with this in mind.
Additionally, using clear, intent-driven headings is crucial to showcase your services or products effectively. Properly structured headings help both users and AI understand the purpose of each section, improving overall visibility.
This aligns with Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE), which aims to deliver more relevant and efficient search results through advanced AI understanding.
Including local business data across your website is essential, particularly for engaging users from your local community. Ensuring consistent and accurate listings throughout the site helps inform visitors and build trust.
This information should be incorporated into dedicated local area pages. Many of our clients include these details on pages such as ‘Showroom’ and ‘Areas We Cover’. Doing so helps Google clearly understand the geographical coverage of your business, which can support local search visibility.
The content should address common user queries—such as opening hours, addresses, and contact details—providing clear and helpful information. Where appropriate, include call-to-action buttons and contact forms. For our online clients, these are often used as an effective alternative to ‘Add to Basket’ functionality, particularly in cases where specific requirements or further enquiries are expected.
With AI-generated answers providing users with immediate information on the search results page, there will be fewer clicks to a website from our potential customers, which may result in our business not having a visible click-through rate.
The businesses we work with rely heavily on local traffic to the website, which could mean fewer direct visits, especially for generic queries. For example, someone searching “best rise and recline chair for elderly UK” might see an AI summary with bullet points, potentially bypassing the site unless it’s directly referenced in the AI snippet.
Our job is to focus on capturing attention through optimised content designed to be featured in AI summaries or leveraging other channels like local listings and reviews to maintain visibility.
Even if a website ranks highly in traditional search results, it might not appear in the AI box unless it’s highly structured and trusted.
This, therefore, may mean ranking #1 organically is no longer enough. You must ensure your content aligns with what AI considers authoritative and relevant, increasing the importance of schema markup, trust signals, and quality content. To local businesses, this will make the playing field more even, as it will take out the authority ranking element of a large business and base it more on the accessibility of the content rather than the linking factors of the company. In some cases, this can change the whole algorithm of the Google search engine ranking model, as there seems to be a more black and white approach to providing the information required.
As a business, we have four measures: number of clicks, number of impressions, click-through-rate and average search position.
The number of clicks is used to identify how effective we appear in the search results for the customer to make a physical click.
The number of impressions shows how effective the amendments to content or additional pages are, due to the continuous work from our SEO area of the business, this is the measure we tend to pay more focus to. These measures show the level of impressions generated from the search results, which is more useful to understand the effectiveness of the work we do. The number of clicks is useful, but it does not take into consideration the level of demand at a particular time.
Click-through rates are derived from the number of impressions and are determined by the % that resulted in a click.
Average positioning is self-explanatory: the average position number of all keywords within Google, this number very rarely drops below 30 due to the volume of words from the data.
We actively monitor search engine performance through key metrics such as clicks, impressions, click-through rates (CTR), average position, and page authority. For example, if two websites publish similar content, the site deemed more trustworthy or authoritative by Google — based on factors like backlinks and expertise — will generally rank higher in search results.
Technical aspects also play a vital role. A site’s speed, structure, and performance all contribute to how well it ranks. Google’s Core Web Vitals — which assess page load time, responsiveness, and visual stability — are increasingly used to evaluate user experience. A high number of scripts or poorly optimised visual elements can reduce these scores, ultimately impacting visibility.
As AI becomes more integrated into search, clear structure, meaningful headings, and engaging, well-formatted content are essential. This helps both search engines and users quickly understand the information, improving your chances of appearing in AI-generated overviews.
For any further information or to book a consultation on this please contact us on contactus@digitalswindon.co.uk