AI assistants now recommend three businesses, not ten links. Here’s what that means for UK firms

For twenty years, being found online meant appearing in a list of ten blue links. Searchers scanned the list, compared a few options and clicked. That is changing quickly. When someone asks ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, Gemini or Perplexity to recommend an accountant, a plumber or a software supplier, the answer usually names two or three businesses and stops there.

For the businesses that are named, this is good news: they skip the comparison stage entirely. For everyone else, it’s a problem that doesn’t show up in a normal Google Analytics report. You can’t see the enquiries you never got because an AI tool recommended a competitor.

How do AI assistants decide which businesses to recommend?

Most people assume AI tools “know” which businesses are good. In practice, for questions about products, services and local businesses, most AI assistants search the web in the background, read a handful of pages and write a summary from them. The businesses that get recommended are the ones that appear most clearly and most often across those pages.

That means three things matter:

• Whether your own website ranks for the searches the AI runs. If your pages aren’t found, they aren’t read.
• Whether other websites mention you. Review sites, industry directories, “best of” articles, local news and forums all feed the answer. A business that only talks about itself on its own website is easy to leave out.
• Whether your content is easy to quote. AI tools lift short, clear passages. A page that buries its main point under three paragraphs of introduction is often skipped, even if it ranks.

Is this replacing Google?

Not yet, and probably not entirely. Google still handles most searches in the UK. But Google itself now shows AI-written answers at the top of many results, so even people who never open ChatGPT are reading AI summaries. The shift isn’t from Google to AI. It’s from lists of links to written answers, wherever people search.

Informational questions are affected most. Someone asking “What is a pension transfer?” often gets everything they need from the AI answer and never clicks. Commercial searches still send clicks, but the AI answer increasingly shapes which business gets that click.

What does the research say works?

One of the most cited studies on this comes from researchers at Princeton University and IIT Delhi, who coined the term generative engine optimisation (GEO). They tested different ways of rewriting web content and measured how often it appeared in AI-generated answers. Adding statistics, quotations and cited sources raised visibility by up to 40%. Stuffing pages with keywords, the old SEO habit, did very little.

In plain terms: AI tools favour content that is specific, sourced and useful. That’s good news for businesses with real expertise, because it rewards the knowledge they already have.

What should businesses do now?

The first step is simply finding out where you stand. Write down ten to twenty questions your customers might ask an AI tool before buying from you, such as “who are the best [your service] providers in [your town]?” or “is [your product] better than [competitor]?” Ask them in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google, and note whether you’re mentioned, how you’re described and who appears instead.

Then work through the basics:

1. Fix your most important pages. Put the answer to the question in the first two sentences, use headings that match how people ask, and include specific facts, prices or timescales.
2. Get mentioned where AI looks. Look at the sources the AI tools cite for your questions. They’re often review platforms, directories and industry lists. Make sure you’re on them, with consistent details.
3. Collect reviews. AI answers about local businesses lean heavily on review sites and Google Business Profiles.
4. Check AI tools can read your site. Some websites block AI crawlers by accident in their robots.txt file. It takes minutes to check.
5. Track it monthly. AI answers change often, so judge progress over several weeks rather than on a single result.

Most of this can be done in-house with a few hours a month. Businesses in competitive markets, or without the time to track prompts and earn mentions across the web, often bring in an AI SEO agency to run it alongside their normal search marketing.

Does this matter for small businesses?

Arguably more than for large ones. A national brand appears across thousands of websites and will be mentioned whether it tries or not. A small business in a single town has far fewer sources describing it, so a handful of good reviews, accurate directory listings and a clear website can make the difference between being recommended and being invisible.

The businesses that move early have an advantage. AI answers draw on what’s already published, and the firms that build a clear, consistent presence now will be the ones those tools keep recommending.

Darren Graham is co-founder and Organic Search Director at 408 Media, a specialist search agency based in Cheshire with offices in Manchester and Birmingham. He has worked in organic search for more than 15 years.