Google’s AI Overviews are becoming a much more significant part of the search experience. According to the market intelligence firm Similarweb’s 2026 Generative AI Landscape Report, AI-generated answers now appear in 43% of searches in the US, up from just 15% a year earlier. This is a significant increase in only 12 months, and it’s changing how people interact with Google. Additionally, the report noted that Google is directing more users towards AI Mode, its conversational search experience.
Visits to AI Mode have increased from 126 million in June 2025 to 279 million in May 2026, showing that more people are choosing to ask complex questions and continue the conversation rather than clicking through a list of search results. For businesses, ranking well is still just as important as ever, but now your visibility also hinges on getting cited by AI.
What Similarweb’s Research Tells Us
One of the report’s most interesting findings is that search queries are becoming longer and more conversational. Users are asking complete questions and expecting direct answers. For example, in AI Mode, people may feel like they’re chatting with an assistant compared to using a traditional search engine. The report also found that websites mentioned within AI experiences are 2.5 times more likely to receive a visit. This statistic is encouraging for brands focusing on producing quality content right now because it shows that earning a citation can generate valuable traffic, even if users aren’t visiting your site through traditional rankings.
Another trend to be aware of is that AI-generated answers often satisfy a user’s query without requiring them to visit a website. As a result, many publishers are reporting lower referral traffic despite maintaining good organic rankings. From our perspective, Google is becoming a destination where questions are answered directly, whereas before its role was to serve users the websites where their questions might be answered. However, this doesn’t mean your website is becoming irrelevant. Being cited in an AI Overview can surface your brand to users much earlier in their decision-making process, helping to build credibility before users reach your website. Your website now needs content that not only ranks well but also provides the type of information AI can easily understand and reference.
We’re also seeing users move between traditional search, AI Overviews, and AI Mode depending on the task they’re trying to complete. A successful strategy now needs to support visibility across all of these experiences.
How to Improve Your Chances of Being Cited in AI Overviews
While traditional SEO is still vital, there are additional ways you can optimise your website and content to improve your chances of earning citations in AI Overviews. Our recommendations as a GEO agency include:
- Front-load your answers – Place concise one- or two-sentence answers or summaries directly below each heading before expanding on a topic
- Use factual information – Include current statistics, specific data, dates, and measurable information that are easy to surface and reference
- Match the user’s search intent – Build comprehensive guides, FAQs, how-tos, and supporting content that answers related questions
- Build your entity footprint – Earn mentions across trusted industry publications, directories, forums, and digital PR opportunities to strengthen your authority
- Use multimedia – Include relevant images with descriptive alt text and consider adding videos where they genuinely improve content. This is important because AI systems are increasingly pulling multimedia from websites, also known as multimodal extraction
- Include social media in your strategy – Content published on platforms such as LinkedIn and Instagram is indexed by Google and regularly referenced within AI-generated search experiences.
The Final Word
There’s no denying that the world of search is changing, but opportunities still exist for businesses that continue to produce authoritative, well-structured content and optimise their websites for citations in AI experiences. Google still needs trustworthy sources to generate its answers, and both strong traditional SEO and GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) are now vital when visibility is no longer limited to ten blue links.
If you’d like to improve your visibility in AI Overviews, we’d love to talk this through with you. Feel free to get in touch, and let’s chat.