A billion people a month are now searching Google with AI. If you're not being cited, you're not being found.

Google held its annual I/O developer conference this week, Ive just read through their email and the announcements related to its search engine buried inside it deserve more attention from small business owners than they're getting.

Here's the headline number.

Just one year after launching AI Mode, Google now has over one billion monthly users running searches through its AI. Query volume has more than doubled every quarter since launch, and last quarter the total number of searches hit an all-time high.

Read that again.

People aren't searching less because of AI. They're searching more. And the way they're searching has fundamentally changed.

What Google actually announced

There’s three things that I can see that matter for your business:

A reimagined Search box. It's the biggest change to the Search box in over 25 years. It dynamically expands so users can describe what they actually want in full sentences, not three-word keyword stubs. They can drop in images, files, videos, or pull from Chrome tabs as part of the query. The new default model is Gemini 3.5 Flash, rolled out globally from this week.

Conversational follow-ups. Users can ask a follow-up directly from an AI Overview and slide straight into AI Mode for a back-and-forth conversation. Google's own line is the one to pay attention to: "Your context stays with you, and as you explore more deeply, the links and supporting articles get even more relevant."

Search agents. Information agents that run in the background, monitoring blogs, news sites, social posts, finance data, and shopping listings for changes related to a specific question. They synthesise updates and send them to the user. Rolling out to Pro and Ultra subscribers this summer.

The bit small business owners need to actually understand

That line about "the deeper you dig, the more relevant the links" to me is the whole game.

SEO as we know it (what I’d' call old SEO) was about simply being ranked number one for "plumber Worcester" ro whatever your key search term is.

New AI search is about being the source Google's model trusts enough to cite when someone asks, "I've got an old radiator that hisses when the heating comes on, the pressure keeps dropping, and I think the boiler might need re-pressurising. Can someone in Worcester come and look at it this week, and what should I expect to pay?"

Those two queries are not the same.

The first is a keyword match. The second is a context-rich, multi-part question that Google's AI breaks down, reasons across, and answers by pulling specific snippets from specific pages, with links sitting alongside them.

If your website is built to rank purely for keywords, it might still rank. But it won't get cited. And the citation is where the clickthrough is beginning to live. Less for locally focussed businesses right now butI would epxect this to change.

Simply look at the adoption of ChatGBT, then look at how it moved so quickly to become used for search and you’ll see the pattern of how search is changing.

Why this matters more for small businesses than for the big players

Big brands have brand search baked in. People type "Screwfix" because they already know Screwfix. The vast majority of small business search opportunity has always sat in the long tail, the specific question, the local context, the niche problem.

That long tail is exactly what AI search amplifies. The deeper and more specific the user's question, the more likely Google's AI is to pull from a long, specific page on a small website rather than from a thin, generic page on a corporate one.

But only if the page actually exists, is structured properly, and is recognisable to the model as a credible source.

What to actually do about it

A few practical points, none of them new, all of them more urgent than they were a week ago:

• Write content that answers full questions, not keywords. If you sell replacement door locks in Manchester, you need a page that addresses "what's the best replacement door lock for a tradtional farm door in an old cottage", not just "door locks Manchester".

• Get your schema markup sorted. Structured data is how you tell Google's AI what your page actually is, who you are, what you charge, what other people have said about you. Without it, you're invisible to the model in any structured sense. Service schema, FAQ schema, review schema, organisation schema, product schema. All of it.

• Build trust signals the model can actually read. Real reviews with structured data. Real author bios. Real business information that matches across your site, Google Business Profile, and the rest of the web. Inconsistency makes you look like a low-trust source.

• Stop thinking in pages, start thinking in answers. Every page on your site should be the best possible answer to a specific question a customer might ask. If a page doesn't answer a question, it's not earning its keep.

• Get your Google Business Profile fully populated. Hours, services, products, photos, posts, the lot. It's the foundation of local AI citation.

It all comes back to one thing, it’s called Topical Authority which I’ve been writing about in The Digital Debrief for years ( and banging the drum loudly about it with my clients - sorry clients!) and it’s actually a really really simple thing to understand:

If Google sees your business website as the authority on its topic then it will refer to it when someone wants to find out something. That meant previouslly it would refer to it in its search results. Today that means it will refer to it in it’s AI search results.

Trust me on this, if you’re not on the case you will get left behind.

The bottom line

A billion people a month are now interrogating Google through AI rather than typing keywords. They're asking longer, more specific questions, and they're getting more specific answers with more specific links.

The businesses being cited in those answers are winning the clicks. The ones who haven't structured their site for that shift are quietly losing visibility without ever seeing a ranking drop, because the ranking system itself is no longer the only game.

If you've been putting off the SEO conversation because the old model felt like a lottery, the new model is more deterministic than people realise. It rewards depth, specificity, structure, and trust. All of which are within reach of any small business willing to take it seriously.

The window to get ahead of competitors who are still treating this as next year's problem is open right now. It won't be open for long.

Here to help if you’re business needs it.

Thanks for reading,
Ollie

(Source: Google's I/O 2026 announcement, "A new era for AI Search", Elizabeth Reid, VP Search, 19 May 2026)

Why Everything You Think You Know About Digital Growth Is Wrong

There's a conversation I have almost every week.

A business owner sits across from me, normally a few hundred miles away on zoom/team/meets, theyr’e smart, experienced, someone who's built something real and they say some version of the same thing:

"We need more leads. Can you sort our SEO? How quickly can we get results?"

And I have to resist the urge to wince.

Not because it's a stupid question. It isn't, and as a growth marketing consultant it’s for me to answer it.

More to the point it's actually a completely reasonable thing to ask if you've been sold the version of digital marketing that most agencies peddle.

The version where SEO is a tap you turn on, where leads arrive like clockwork once someone's "done the website," and where Google Ads solves everything overnight.

That version is fiction. And believing it is costing UK businesses a fortune.

The "Switch" Myth

The dominant narrative in digital marketing goes something like this: pick a channel, invest in it, watch the leads roll in. Run some ads. Rank on Google. Post on LinkedIn. Done.

It's a seductive story because it's simple. It implies that digital growth is a product you buy rather than a capability you build. And it lets agencies sell you a service without ever having to be accountable for your actual business outcomes.

The reality? Digital growth isn't a switch. It's a system. And systems only work when all the parts are functioning together.

Five Pieces. One Broken One Ruins Everything.

Let's talk about the five components that actually drive digital growth — and why isolating any one of them is a guaranteed path to disappointment.

1. SEO — The Long Game Most People Give Up On

Search engine optimisation gets more misunderstood than almost anything else in digital. People either dismiss it ("we tried it, didn't work") or treat it like a technical checkbox ("we've been told our site is optimised").

Here's what SEO actually is: it's the process of making sure that when your ideal customer goes looking for what you do, they find you not your competitor. That's it. No mystery.

But here's the bit nobody tells you: SEO without a functioning website is a waste. SEO without content is a waste.

SEO without conversion optimisation is the most expensive kind of waste there is as you're paying to get people through the door of a shop that's impossible to navigate.

Traffic is not revenue. Traffic is opportunity. And opportunity squandered is worse than no opportunity at all, because at least then you're not spending money to create it.

2. CRO — The Part Nobody Talks About

Conversion Rate Optimisation is the process of turning the visitors you already have into enquiries, leads, and customers. And it is, by some margin, the most overlooked discipline in digital marketing.

Why? Because it doesn't feel exciting. It doesn't have the glamour of "we're ranking number one" or "we got 10,000 visitors last month."

It's methodical. It requires looking at evidence. It requires accepting that your website, the one you spent six months agonising over, might be actively putting people off.

It could be something as simple as your contact page not being setup correctly so that your loosing possible customers.

But here's the maths: if your website converts at 1% and you do the work to get it to 2%, you've just doubled your leads without spending a single extra pound on traffic. Every pound you were already spending on SEO, ads, or content suddenly works twice as hard.

CRO is the multiplier that nobody invests in. Which means the businesses that do are playing a different game entirely.

3. UX — Not a Design Thing. A Business Thing.

User experience has been hijacked by the design industry and turned into something that sounds expensive and abstract.

It isn't. UX is simply this: does your website make it easy for the right person to do the thing you want them to do?

Can they find what they're looking for in under three seconds?

Does your navigation make sense to someone who doesn't know your business? Does your page load before they lose patience? Is it readable on a phone?

These aren't design questions. They're revenue questions.

Because every point of friction is a point of exit. And people exit fast — faster than you'd believe, and almost certainly faster than your Google Analytics is telling you.

Poor UX kills SEO (Google measures it). Poor UX kills CRO (people leave). Poor UX kills content (nobody reads it). Get the experience wrong and nothing else you do downstream can save you.

4. Content — Not "Just Blogging"

Here's a phrase that makes me tired: "we should probably start a blog."

Content is not a blog.

Content is the mechanism through which you demonstrate that you understand your customer's problem better than anyone else, and that you're the credible, authoritative choice to solve it.

Done properly, content does three things simultaneously. It feeds SEO by giving search engines something to index and rank.

It feeds CRO by handling objections, building trust, and moving people through a decision. And it positions you not as a vendor, but as the obvious expert in your space.

But content without an audience strategy is a tree falling in an empty forest. And content without a UX that surfaces it effectively? It just sits there, unread, making nobody any money.

5. Lead Generation — The Output, Not the Strategy

And here's the one that ties it all together and the one most business owners come to me asking about in isolation.

Lead generation is not a strategy. It's an outcome.

It's what happens when your SEO brings the right people to your site, your UX makes it effortless to navigate, your content convinces them you're the right choice, and your CRO captures them at the moment they're ready to act.

Pull any one of those pieces out and your lead generation falls apart. Spend money on ads to drive traffic to a site that converts at 0.5%? You're burning cash.

Produce brilliant content that nobody can find? Invisible. Rank on page one and then confuse visitors with a navigation that makes no sense? Gone.

Lead generation is the finish line, not the starting point. Treating it as the thing you "do" without building the system behind it is like hiring a closer to make sales calls with no product to sell.

The Full Circle

So what does it look like when it actually works?

It looks like this: a prospective customer searches for something. Your content ranks, because your SEO is sound.

They click through to a page that loads quickly and makes immediate sense, because your UX is considered. The content on that page speaks directly to their problem and answers their likely objections, because your content strategy is deliberate.

There's a clear, obvious, low-friction next step, because your CRO is set up to capture intent.

And a lead arrives in your inbox.

That's not magic. It's not luck. It's a system working as designed.

The businesses that crack digital growth aren't the ones who found the best agency or discovered some Google algorithm secret.

They're the ones who stopped treating digital as a collection of disconnected services and started treating it as an integrated function of their business.

What Most Agencies Won't Tell You

Most agencies will gladly sell you one piece of the puzzle. They'll run your ads, or write your blogs, or redesign your website.

And they'll report back to you on metrics that make their work look good — impressions, rankings, traffic — while quietly ignoring whether any of it is actually converting into revenue.

That's not necessarily malicious. Often it's structural: they're an SEO agency, so they measure SEO things. They're not incentivised to point out that your conversion rate is the real problem.

But for you, the business owner, that fragmentation is expensive.

You end up paying multiple suppliers for work that doesn't connect, wondering why "digital" never quite delivers what it promised.

The Honest Answer

If you came to me tomorrow and said "I want more leads, where do we start?", here's what I'd actually tell you:

1. We start with what you've already got.

2. We look at your traffic, your conversion rates, your content, and your user experience.

3. We find the weakest link. because that's where your ceiling is. That's what's capping your growth regardless of how much more you spend on top.

4. Then we build out from there methodically, in the right order, with everything connected to everything else

It won't happen overnight. Anyone who tells you it will is either mistaken or misleading you.

But when it works, it compounds. And just like interest on your savings account compounding is good.

Traffic builds on content. Content builds trust. Trust converts. Conversions fund more traffic. The system feeds itself.

That's what digital growth actually looks like.

Not a switch. A flywheel.

And once it's spinning, it's very hard to stop.

Thanks for reading,

Ollie

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