AI and My Small Business SEO
Artificial Intelligence is changing the SEO landscape. You must adapt or die.
Artificial intelligence has taken over the top spots in search engine results.
AI Overviews and Summaries are intercepting your prospects and providing information without requiring a click on anything (including your website listing).
On-page SEO tactics are still required, but off-page content creation is critical to appear in AI-generated search. Artificial intelligence has taken over the top spots in search engine results.
Search Engine Optimization is the art of maximizing the visibility of your website to drive traffic from free, organic listings on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
Until recently, the process was straightforward: identify keywords prospective customers will use to search for your product or service, place those keywords in your webpages and in the meta name for your site. The hope is that when a search engine crawls your website, it will index them in a way that you will be highly ranked in the results for your keywords, increasing your visibility.
As a small business, you don’t have the time or resources to pay attention to all search engines that may be used by your customers. Focus is critical to success. Google is the 600-pound gorilla of search engines. For August 2025, Statcounter.com reported that Google’s overall market share was 86% (76% desktop, 93% mobile). Your focus should be on Google. What works on Google should work well on other search engines and the vast majority of your results will come from focusing on the 86% and ignoring the remaining 14%.
SHRINKING SERP REAL ESTATE
Search engine optimization has always been a competition for limited real estate. And only appearance on the first page of the results is relevant. The most commonly reported statistics are that 92% of searchers stay on page one of the results. Again, focus: If you can’t get on the first page, spend your efforts elsewhere.
The evolution of Google’s search engine results page is critical to understanding the current challenges to optimization.
Google online search became available in 1998 to provide a tool for dealing with the explosion of websites and the difficulty of finding relevant content. At the beginning, Google displayed up to ten organic search results on page one. The entirety of page one real estate was available. Google then began to add extra features and additional information.
In 2000, Google created AdWords, providing an opportunity to pay for appearances on search results pages. A maximum of four ads could appear among the listings. This meant that the real estate available for organic listings was reduced to as low as six spots.
After this, Google moved to a universal search displaying not only website results, but maps, videos, images and other results—more competition for users’ attention. Many other features have been added, such as search suggestions and the display of suggested search parameters even before the search terms have been completely entered.
In May of 2024, Google introduced Artificial Intelligence Overviews in the US, providing AI summaries at the top of search results. These AI Summaries push all else down on the page. The Pew Research Center reported that AI Overviews appear in 18% of all searches. The Search Engine Journal reported its appearance in 47% of searches. Reported numbers are all over the spectrum. Google’s other new SERP features such as Featured Snippets, People Also Ask, What People are Saying, and Product Considerations are pushing organic search results even further down.
THE NO-CLICK SEARCH
In addition to shrinking the real estate where your search result may appear, AI begat the ”No-Click Search.”
Google’s objective is to provide the most relevant information to the user in the fastest time possible.
Before AI, the results were generally a mix of 10 organic and up to 4 paid listings. The objective of SEO was to entice the user to click on your website’s search results. Almost all searches resulted in a click. Not so anymore.
Searches are divided into four main categories based upon the user’s intent:
Search Engine Categories by Intent
AI Overviews and Summaries are now providing users with relevant information without requiring a click on any search results. This is particularly true of informational searches which comprise more than half of all searches. These overviews and summaries can also significantly affect the results of other types of searches as well. The visibility of your website is diluted as AI steps between the user and your search listing.
SEO FUTURE
The future of SEO for small businesses will now have two components:
First, all the on-page SEO tactics that have been useful in the past are not going away and will still be useful. These include such things as:
Keywords included in your web page content
Use of images and image-alt tags
Page titles (title tags)
Headers (body tags)
Meta descriptions for each page
Page URLs: keep it simple and short
Hyperlinking pages on your site
Mobile responsiveness
Site loading speed: faster is better
Second, off-page SEO tactics are now critical to success. Create content that increases your chance of showing up in the search page features that display at the top of the page. This will often be content that provides a concise answer to a question. AI components include:
AI overview: Google complies the results from various sources through an AI large language model
Featured Snippets: Google will extract a featured snippet from the content on a website (hopefully yours). Google seems to like definitions or descriptions, tables and lists
People Also Ask: you can create FAQs on your site
High quality visuals: are often displayed from relevant websites
Having quality content on your website is critical to your success and should demonstrate your experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.
About the Author
Gene Wayne is President of Market Master and Author of Big Bang Marketing for Small Business: Growing Your Revenue with Google Ads and More, available at Big Bang Marketing for Small Business.
Market Master is a digital marketing consultancy for small business. At Market Master, we work with you to clearly identify your target customers and the services most valuable to them. We then design marketing program to drive traffic to your website or store and encourage conversions. We will then implement the program for you and help you monitor its success and your return on investment.
You can arrange for a free consultation at www.mymarketmaster.com or contact Gene at gene@mymarketmaster.com.