Why search still matters

People still start with search

A business is only as visible as its website is findable. For most people, finding still starts with a search engine, and in the UK that means Google: it had 91.39% of UK search in September 2026.^[1] Four in five UK adults (82%) use Google Search, which handles about 3 billion UK searches a month.^[6]

Worldwide, Google handles more than 5 trillion searches a year,^[5] and it sent nearly 90% of the traffic that search engines referred to websites in 2025.^[7] Search engine optimisation, making sure Google can find, understand and show a site, is still the foundation.

Now they also ask AI

The new habit sits alongside the old one. 54% of UK adults now use AI tools such as ChatGPT, Copilot or Gemini.^[2] Google’s own AI Overviews, the AI answers above its results, reach more than 2.5 billion people a month,^[8] and about 30% of UK searches now show one.^[6]

People ask AI differently, too: questions in Google’s AI Mode are three times longer than traditional searches.^[9] McKinsey found 44% of US users of AI-powered search call it their primary source of insight, ahead of traditional search at 31%.^[10]

Businesses have moved the same way. The most common reason UK businesses use AI is to research information, often in place of a search engine such as Google (28%).^[11]

Answers, not links

Search and AI assistants increasingly answer the question on the page, so fewer people click through. In the first four months of 2026, 68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click.^[12] In a Bain survey, about 80% of consumers said they rely on answers without clicking for at least 40% of their searches, which Bain estimates cuts organic web traffic by 15 to 25%.^[13]

When fewer people click, it matters more who the answer is built from. That is what generative engine optimisation (GEO) is about: making your pages the ones AI assistants can read, trust and cite.

Being the source is what counts

Being cited pays, in two ways:

• More clicks. Seer Interactive found that brands cited in an AI Overview got 35% more organic clicks than those that were not.^[14]
• Better visitors. Adobe found AI visitors converted 42% better than other visitors to US retail sites in March 2026.^[15] Semrush estimates a visitor from AI search is worth 4.4 times one from traditional organic search.^[4] At Ahrefs itself, AI search brought 0.5% of visitors but 12.1% of sign-ups: one company, but a telling example.^[16]

Yet a brand’s own site is often only 5 to 10% of the sources AI search draws on, and only 16% of brands track how they appear in it.^[10]

Local businesses: the same shift

The change reaches local businesses too. In BrightLocal’s 2026 survey of US consumers:

• 45% used ChatGPT or other AI tools for local business recommendations, up from 6% a year earlier.^[3]
• 82% read AI-written summaries of reviews, and 42% trust AI recommendations as much as traditional reviews.^[3]

McKinsey found around 40 to 55% of consumers in leading sectors already use AI-based search to make purchasing decisions.^[10] These are US figures; the UK habits above suggest the same direction.

SEO and GEO: one set of foundations

The good news is that one well-built website serves both. Google says there are no extra requirements or special optimisations needed to appear in its AI Overviews or AI Mode.^[17] The same foundations do the work:

Where to start

Start by finding out how your site is read today. Our audit scores your pages on the 26 variables that decide it, for Google and for AI assistants, and the study on the rise of GEO has the evidence behind them.

Then fix what is wrong, one checked change at a time. That is what Martar Search Solutions does: see how it works.