If you've had a website for a few years, you've probably been told at some point in the last eighteen months that it now needs "AI optimisation” or maybe seen an ad or been emailed to ‘check if your website is AI ready’ so what should you do?
What actually changed
Two things, really.
The first is that Google now answers a lot of questions on the results page itself. AI Overviews sit above the traditional links, and AI Mode — a full conversational search experience — passed a billion monthly users in mid-2026. Google generates these answers by pulling from its normal search index, summarising several sources at once. Someone asking "how often should a boiler be serviced" often gets their answer without clicking anything.
The second is that a meaningful number of people have stopped starting at Google altogether. They ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or Perplexity instead, and follow up with three or four related questions in the same conversation. When those tools cite a source, some of those users click through to the site.
Both of these depend on the same thing: an AI system reading web pages and deciding which ones to trust and reference. That's the shift. Not a new algorithm — a new layer sitting on top of the same index.
So how does this affect my website?
We have done considerable research amongst developers sites and Published figures disagree with each other wildly however, Click-through rates are down on informational queries. Estimates of the drop range from around a third to over half on searches where an AI Overview appears but it is not necessarily bad news. It means that when customers do eventually get to your site having got through the AI answers in the first place, they are more aware of what they want and so are easier to convert to sales, rather than the ‘just looking’ clicks.
Do you need to change your existing site?
For most sites, no — not structurally.
In May 2026 Google published its first official guidance on optimising for generative AI features, and it was refreshingly blunt. The core message was that AEO and GEO are not separate disciplines, that optimising for AI search is still just SEO, and that the same crawlable, credible, useful pages that rank in normal search are what get surfaced in AI answers.
So if someone quotes you for a rebuild on the basis that your site "can't be read by AI," ask them to be specific about what's broken. Usually the answer is nothing.
What is worth doing
The work that matters is mostly work that already mattered, with a few sharpened edges.
Make sure you're actually crawlable. This is the one genuine technical prerequisite. A page has to be indexed and eligible to appear with a snippet before it can show up in an AI answer.
The bottom line
Search is genuinely changing. Your website almost certainly isn't the problem.
The sites doing well in AI search are the ones doing well in normal search: technically sound, honestly written, specific about what they actually do, and maintained rather than launched and forgotten. If your site was neglected before AI Overviews arrived, AI search will expose that faster — but the fix is the same fix it always was.
Be suspicious of anyone selling you a separate AI strategy. Ask instead whether your site is fast, crawlable, accurate and worth citing. Get the basics right and don’t worry about the new tech.