AI search and your business website: what the data says and what to do

Search results increasingly start with an AI-written summary. For a business that depends on its website for enquiries, the practical question is what that changes.

What Pew measured

Pew Research Center analyzed the browsing of 900 U.S. adults in March 2025, covering 68,879 Google searches. Users clicked a traditional search result link in 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared, compared with 15% of visits when it did not. They clicked a link inside the AI summary itself in 1% of visits. And they ended their browsing session on 26% of pages with an AI summary, compared with 16% of pages without one. Pew notes these are associations from observational data, the data covers Google only, and it reflects March 2025, so behavior may have changed since.

What Google says site owners should do

Google's documentation says the best practices for SEO remain relevant for AI Overviews and AI Mode, and that there are no additional requirements or special optimizations needed to appear in them. A page must be indexed and eligible to show in Search with a snippet. Google also says you do not need to create new machine-readable files, AI text files or markup to appear in these features, and that there is no special structured data to add. Google adds that sites appearing in these features are counted in the normal Web performance report in Search Console.

A practical checklist

• Make sure crawling is allowed in robots.txt and by your hosting or CDN, and that important content is real text on the page rather than loaded only by scripts or locked in images.
• Write pages that answer the questions your customers actually ask, in plain language, with specifics such as service areas, prices or ranges where you can state them.
• Link your pages to each other so every service page can be found.
• Keep structured data consistent with the visible text on the page.
• Keep your Google Business Profile and other listings accurate and consistent.
• Measure enquiries and calls, not only clicks, because fewer clicks do not necessarily mean fewer customers.

Sources

• Pew Research Center, "Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results" (July 22, 2025)
• Google Search Central, "AI features and your website"