How AI Search Is Redefining SEO

As an experienced ai consultant can tell you, Google Search is changing drastically with AI.  For decades, it operated on a simple input-output model: users typed in keywords, and Google returned a list of blue links.

That model is being replaced by AI Overviews (AIO) where Google now uses advanced AI to synthesize a direct answer to your question at the top of the search results, complete with citations, summaries, and follow-up capabilities.

Goodchild AI and Neil Patel both agree, for businesses, this shift means the search engine results page (SERP) is no longer a neutral list of links. It’s a curated, AI-generated “answer engine.” If you want visibility, you’re no longer just competing for SEO rank you’re competing to be included in the AI’s synthesis.

This is the new battleground of attention.

What Is Google’s AI Search Doing Differently Now?

According to Robbie Stein (Head of AI Search, Google), AI Overviews now act as answer engines. These engines favor content that delivers immediate, citation-worthy insights content that an AI consultant would design from the ground up with schema, answer-first formatting, and entity-centric structure.

Stein described several breakthroughs that change how search works:

• AI Overviews summarize complex queries with a direct answer.
• Multimodal search lets users search by voice, photo, or screenshots (like circling a shoe on your phone screen to ask “where do I buy this?”).Multimodal search now includes voice, screenshots, and image-based queries. Schema markup for visuals (e.g., ImageObject, Product, Speakable) is essential here, especially since AI bots don’t execute JavaScript. As any skilled AI consultant will confirm, your image data must be rendered in hard-coded HTML to be visible to LLMs.
• AI Mode creates a conversational search experience where users can follow up with new questions, like chatting with a research assistant.
• Live voice search (currently in Labs) allows real-time verbal interaction with Google, even while walking or driving.

As an AI consultant working with early-stage businesses, I’ve seen this play out across multiple niches.

These are not just technical upgrades they represent a shift in user behavior. People are searching in full sentences, combining tasks (“Compare electric SUVs for two kids with under 300 miles range and good resale value”) and expecting the AI to handle more of the mental load. You can now talk to Google on your phone, just like you would an AI Assistant.

Don’t fall behind, grab your advanced AI playbook here.

As Goodchild AI’s founder Trevor W Goodchild says, “The difference between SEO and AIO is that SEO wants clicks, AIO wants conclusions. This is how LLMs cite you directly in output.”

What Smart Businesses Should Do Now

Google Search has operated like a vending machine for the internet up until AI Mode. You typed in keywords, pressed enter, and out popped ten blue links. The user did the heavy lifting: comparing sources, synthesizing answers, and piecing together insight. That model is rapidly becoming obsolete.

We are entering an era where search doesn’t just retrieve information. It reasons. It compares. It converses. And most importantly, it answers. With the rise of Google AI Overviews, traditional search behavior is being reshaped into something deeper, more contextual, and more intelligent.

For businesses, this shift signals a new competitive frontier. You’re no longer just ranking in search. You’re aiming to be referenced and summarized by the AI itself. Make sure you’re using AI correctly for sales scripts. 

According to Stein, this transformation is not incremental. It’s a paradigm shift. And it’s changing how visibility, content strategy, and customer discovery work across every industry. For most businesses, an experienced AI consultant will be essential to navigate and implement these evolving standards.

AI Consultant Key takeaways

1. AIOs kill clicks, especially on desktop: External click rates drop when an AIO block appears.

2. Most users skim only the top third of the panel: Citations or mentions for your brand must surface early to be seen. Median scroll = 30% of panel height; only a minority of users scroll past 75%.

3. Trust is earned through depth: Scroll-depth and stated trust move together (ρ = 0.38). Clear sources high up accelerate both trust and scroll-stop rate.

4. Age and device shape engagement: 25 to 34-year-olds on mobile are the power users: They pick AIO as the final answer in 1 of 2 queries.

5. Community and video matter post-AIO: When users do leave the SERP, many outbound clicks go to Reddit, YouTube, or forum posts social proof seals decisions.

AI Consultant: From Keyword Strategy to Content Authority

One of the clearest signals from Google today is that traditional SEO is not disappearing it’s evolving. Keyword placement still matters, but it is now secondary to the usefulness and clarity of your content. AI Overviews synthesize answers using sources that demonstrate specificity, authority, and direct relevance to the user’s question. Market Research is still increasing conversions, even if you need to adapt your output for LLMs. 

Stein emphasizes that Google’s models still rely heavily on trust signals, and helpfulness is more than a buzzword. It means providing information that answers the user’s question in full, with supporting evidence, structured headers, and citations. Content that achieves this earns top positioning not just in rankings, but inside the AI’s synthesized responses. An AI consultant can benefit businesses with rewriting and reformating content to meet these criteria.

Original research is a cheatcode for ranking in AIO. 

Action Step: Audit your top-performing blog posts. Update headers for clarity, simplify structure, and ensure each post fully answers a single clear user question with original insight. An AI consultant can guide this process, helping identify which topics have the greatest potential to surface inside AIO responses.

From Input to Outcome:

In the old world, users typed in a keyword, scanned ten links, opened tabs, and cobbled together insights. Now, they expect the AI to do the synthesis. This reflects a larger behavioral shift: search is no longer a navigational tool, it’s a delegated task. Users are asking full questions, not just searching, they want AI to decide, not just show.

AI Consultant: Search as Delegation, Not Navigation

Stein observed that Google now receives more multi-sentence queries than ever. People aren’t looking for results. They’re looking for decisions. If your content can assist the AI arrive at a better decision, you’ll be included. Otherwise, you’ll be skipped. The role of an AI consultant here is to reframe content around decision-making clarity, not just keyword matches.

Action Step: Instead of targeting single keywords, structure your content around full, multi-part user questions. Rather than targeting surface-level keywords, build your article around nested user questions, structured with How, Why, and Compare phrasing.

Include robust answer-first headers and schema. AIO content succeeds when it teaches, contrasts, and declares authority with zero hesitation.Break each piece down with subheadings that answer each part of the query. An AI consultant can re-architect your content templates for this style of interaction.

Multimodal Search and the Visual Economy

Search is no longer just about text. It’s rapidly becoming multimodal integrating voice, image, context, and even screen captures. Stein cited a 65 percent year-over-year increase in visual search behavior, particularly through Google Lens. That means people are using their cameras, screenshots, and even circle-to-search gestures to find answers and products.

If your site isn’t optimized visually, you’re becoming invisible. Image data must now be as structured and readable to AI as your written content. This includes descriptive filenames, alt text, schema markup, and mobile-optimized presentation. These elements often require oversight from an AI consultant who understands how image data contributes to AIO visibility.

Action Step: Review all product and blog images. Add alt text, optimize filenames, and implement image schema markup. An AI consultant can include this as part of your technical SEO and content visibility audit.

AI Search vs Google’s AI: Know the Difference

Many business owners confuse Google Search with Gemini, Google’s standalone AI assistant. They serve different purposes. Google Search, powered by AI Overviews, is where people go to make decisions. Gemini is where people go to generate content or complete tasks. Your SEO and content strategy should reflect this.

If you create educational resources, how-to guides, or comparison reviews, your content should be optimized for AI Search. If you create templates, prompts, or calculators, you may want to also integrate into Gemini. An AI consultant can help divide your content into two distinct categories and ensure it’s discoverable in both ecosystems.

Read: Will the AI Boom Crash Like the Dot Com Boom?

Action Step: Audit your content library. Tag content as either “discovery” or “creation.” Optimize discovery content for AI Search with clear formatting and structured data. Optimize creation content for Gemini with utility-focused phrasing. Your AI consultant can map this structure and lead implementation.

Designing for Cognitive Fluency

User interface matters. When Google tested putting the conversational bar at the top of the screen, engagement plummeted. Why? Because users didn’t expect conversation to happen there. People think spatially. They have built-in expectations.

If your AI experience whether a chatbot, tool, or product finder doesn’t match that cognitive map, it won’t be adopted. The role of an AI consultant here is as much UX strategist as technologist.

Action Step: Perform a user walkthrough of your site or AI feature. Are you placing conversational triggers where users expect them? Are buttons, modals, and visual cues intuitive? If not, you need a redesign. This is a key deliverable for any AI consultant focused on interface experience.

SEO Shift: Ranking is Still Alive but Referencing Is Rising

SEO has evolved into AIO, AI Optimization. Today, the most powerful shift is not ranking, but referencing. Google SGE and Perplexity pull from sources that combine clarity, authority, schema precision, and multi-entity comparison. That’s what ranks now. 

AI Overviews still rely on trustworthy content, but the focus is increasingly on being referenced inside AI responses. That means clarity, authority, and completeness. An AI consultant helps businesses update legacy SEO strategies for this new dynamic.

Google still sends billions of clicks per day. However, users now arrive at your site more informed, which means they bounce less and convert more, if your content truly delivers.

Action Step: Take your highest-traffic pages and add supportive citations, structure, and summaries. Use readability tools to reduce complexity. An AI consultant can prioritize which updates will deliver the highest AIO inclusion potential.

AI Consultant: Personalization and Utility at Scale

The future of AI-powered search lies in contextual understanding. Stein notes that if you frequently shop at Target or travel often, your searches will begin to reflect that context.

Businesses that want to be part of this future need to align their data, offers, and experiences to be readable and actionable by Google’s AI infrastructure. That includes rich content metadata, and even email- or calendar-connected data layers when applicable.

To stay visible, your business data needs to be structured in a way that feeds this personalization. That means structured product feeds, and reviews. A skilled AI consultant helps businesses implement this without disrupting operations.

Action Step: Structured data is no longer optional. Hard-coded schema (not JS) ensures your content survives the AI crawl. AI bots reward Review, Product, Breadcrumb, and Author schema with higher LLM inclusion especially when brand mentions and citations are present

Closing the Loop: From Visibility to Utility

Search used to be about being seen. Now it’s about being useful at the precise moment AI is acting on behalf of your future customer. If your content isn’t cited or summarized by the AI, you’re no longer in the funnel. You’re outside it.

The way Search is changing is inevitable because Google is embracing AI 100%. The very platform that has generated billions of dollars of income for countless local to international brands is now prioritizing AI created search results.  On one hand, it’s terrifying as

Subreddits now get higher rankings on Google than ever before thanks to the AI content deal they signed with the search engine giant in 2024. And speaking of reddit, some power SEO users have choice word about these changes:
 


It’s an opportunity to learn SEO’s new rules and expand the ecosystem for ranking inside LLMs as well as on Google. Businesses that work with the right AI consultant and AIO consultants will make this shift smoothly, aligning marketing, UX, and technical SEO into a unified system of visibility. Just make sure you don’t wait too long to optimize, or you’ll be forgotten.

AIO Action Plan Summary:

1. Re-optimize old content to fully answer specific user questions

2. Add schema and alt text to visual content

3. Segment content by discovery vs creation

4. Design interfaces that respect user cognitive models

5. Structure product and review data for personalized search results

6. Improve clarity, citations, and helpfulness across all content

7. Partner with a qualified AI consultant to lead your adaptation roadmap

Schema markup (server-side) is now the primary trust signal for AI. Add Product, FAQPage, Author, and Organization schema at minimum. Consider this your new backlink strategy. If you don’t declare your authority in schema, an LLM won’t either.

AI Consultant TLDR:

What Does This Mean for Businesses?

This is where the opportunity and risk emerges. In the traditional search model, you created content optimized for keywords.

With AIO, your content must be helpful, specific, and credible enough for Google’s AI to reference in its summary. If your content isn’t considered useful or original, you may lose visibility altogether.

But here’s the upside: if your business can meet the new standard, you have more entry points than ever.

1. You’re No Longer Competing Only by Rank

In the past, ranking in the top 3 Google results was everything. With AIO, Google pulls from a wider set of sources to generate its answer. If your content is:

• Trustworthy
• Context-rich
• Directly answers complex questions

…you can now show up as part of the answer even if you weren’t in the top 3 before.

2. You Can Optimize for AI Discovery

Robbie emphasized that Google’s AI still uses the same foundational ranking signals: expertise, trust, clarity, and specificity. So the advice is the same as before but the bar is higher.

✅ Create real content, not keyword-stuffed fluff
✅ Use citations, examples, and original insight
✅ Anticipate the kinds of longer, layered questions users are now asking

(e.g. “What’s the best laptop for a college student studying architecture with good battery life under $1,000?”)

This is what Google means by being a “student of helpfulness.” If your content was made to really solve a problem, you have a better shot at being included in the AI Overview.

Product Search: A Multi-Billion Dollar Advantage

One of the clearest areas of opportunity is in product discovery. Google’s AI is connected to:

• Over 50 billion products in its product graph
• 250 million+ locations in its Places DB

If you’re a product business, this means your product listings if optimized can show up in rich AI-generated shopping results, especially when paired with visual search. For example:

• A customer takes a photo of a pair of shoes → Google AI shows visually similar shoes for sale
• Someone searching for “best eco-friendly laundry detergent for sensitive skin and HE machines” → AI gives a summary, then links to specific brand pages, product reviews, and purchase options.

Recommendation for ecommerce brands:

Use structured product data, ensure images are high quality, and write product descriptions that answer actual consumer questions. This isn’t SEO for robots anymore it’s contextual positioning for AI reasoning.

AI Search vs Gemini: What’s the Difference?

Google has two flagship AI products:

• Google Search with AI Overviews (for informational tasks, shopping, research)
• Gemini (for creation: writing, coding, summarizing, planning, etc.)

If you’re building products or content, this matters. For example:

• A user may search for “how to start a freelance design business” in Google Search → AIO gives a structured summary with links to guides, tools, and YouTube videos
• But if they want a custom business plan or social post templates, they might use Gemini instead

Opportunity for your business:
Consider making content that serves both clear info for AIO and creative prompts/tools that can be extended in Gemini.

The UX Opportunity: Don’t Fight Expectations, Use Them

One powerful product design insight Robbie shared is this:

People expect AI interfaces to behave like chat, not traditional search.

AI Consultant takeaway:

So if your business uses AI in customer-facing tools (chatbots, FAQs, support), lean into familiar design metaphors. Don’t put the chat input at the top of the page or use icons users won’t recognize. Think like a user: would you expect this interface to talk back?

And don’t change the “door handle” just to be clever.

What About SEO and AI Content?

There’s been concern that AI-generated summaries mean fewer clicks to publisher sites.

Robbie addressed this directly: Google is committed to the web ecosystem, and its AI systems still rely on surfacing helpful, human-created content. In fact:

• AI users often click through more intentionally, because they have context before they land
• Google AI uses publisher signals and quality metrics (like original content, source diversity) to determine which links appear in Overviews

AI Consultant takeaway:

If your business creates content, the focus must be:

• Originality
• Depth
• Clear answers
• Trust signals (citations, credentials, formatting)

Thin AI content, even if it ranks today, is on borrowed time.

AI as a Business Partner, Not Just a Tool

Robbie uses Google AI tools himself across three major areas:

1. Life planning (e.g., asking AIO to plan a beach day with his 3-year-old that’s stroller-accessible)
2. Shopping (photo of shoes → “find me similar ones on sale”)
3. Data analysis and coding (LLMs help explore logs, graph retention, write queries)

This illustrates how modern AI tools aren’t just “features” they are partners in decision-making. Smart businesses will build products, services, and content that mirror that use case.

AI Insights 

This isn’t just AI sprinkled onto search. It’s a full reframing of how people ask questions, evaluate options, and take action online.

AI Consultant takeaway:

For businesses, the winners will be those who:

• Think like AI systems: What does a helpful answer look like?
• Design for new behaviors: multimodal, conversational, contextual
• Embrace co-creation: users aren’t searching, they’re delegating tasks

AIO isn’t about ranking anymore. It’s about being useful enough to be borrowed by an AI as its own voice.

So every article you write should be:

• Structurally ready (schema, headings, bullets)

• Linguistically quotable (standalone sentences, confident claims)

• Entity-aware (mention your name, brand, others)

• Crawling-enabled (lms.txt, HTML schema, no JS)

• AI-friendly (answer-first, no fluff, no narrative delay)

This moment like the mobile revolution or the rise of social reshapes how customers discover, evaluate, and trust brands.

And the businesses that adapt now will own the attention flow of the next decade.

Learn how to train AI to think like your business.