Getting found when AI answers: what matters for your website now

When someone asks an AI who does good work in your field in your area – does your business show up in the answer?

Search is changing. Many Google searches now show an AI Overview at the top – a summary written by AI. Since 8 October 2025, Google has also been rolling out AI Mode in Germany: a separate area where you ask the search questions as in a chat. On top of that, there are AI assistants that search the web themselves. For company websites, this means: some people get the answer without clicking on a search result.

What can be measured

The Pew Research Center analysed the browsing behaviour of 900 adults in the US in March 2025. When an AI summary was shown, people clicked on a traditional search result in only 8 per cent of visits. Without a summary, it was 15 per cent. Links in the summary itself were clicked in about one per cent of visits.

These are US figures, but the direction is clear: fewer clicks for general knowledge questions. For you as a business, that's less dramatic than it sounds. Someone asking “What is an e-invoice?” is rarely a customer. Someone searching for “tax adviser for trades businesses near me” ultimately wants to call someone. And that's exactly what AI needs sources for – your website, your business profile, your reviews.

What Google itself says

Google is refreshingly matter-of-fact here: there are no additional requirements and no special optimisations for AI Overviews and AI Mode. The usual basics apply. A page must be indexed and eligible to appear in search with a snippet. According to Google, no special AI files or special schema markup are needed.

What really helps

• Clear answers to real questions. Write the way your customers ask. A good page answers “How much does … cost?”, “How long does … take?” and “Who is … for?” in sentences people understand.
• Important things as text. Services, price ranges and opening hours belong in the text – not just in images or PDFs.
• Structured data that matches the text. Google stresses: what's in the code must match the visible text.
• A well-maintained business profile. Name, address, phone number, opening hours and category must be the same and up to date everywhere.
• Evidence, not claims. Real examples, verifiable figures and sources make content quotable – for people and for machines.
• Technology that doesn't get in the way. Fast pages, clean internal links and no areas accidentally blocked in robots.txt.

Sound familiar? Exactly. Good visibility in AI searches is, at its core, good visibility in search – just more honest. Anyone who has always written for people has a head start. A low-barrier site helps twice, by the way – more on that in Accessibility: does my website need it as a B2B company?

Get found locally – via AI too

For many businesses, the local area is what counts most. Anyone searching for “physiotherapy with evening appointments” or “commercial electrician near me” gets results that rely heavily on business profiles, reviews and clear location details. AI answers draw on the same sources. Three things make the biggest difference here:

• A separate page for each service instead of one long list, each with the location or service area in the text.
• Genuine reviews that you respond to kindly – including the critical ones. Bought reviews do more harm than good.
• The same details everywhere: website, business profile, business directories. Contradictions confuse people and machines.

Stay in control

You can control what Google shows from your pages – with the familiar preview settings such as “nosnippet” or “max-snippet”. That makes sense for areas that shouldn't be summarised. And if you don't want your content used to train AI, in Germany you can declare a machine-readable reservation of use under § 44b of the Copyright Act (Urheberrechtsgesetz). We do this on this website ourselves: reading yes, training no.

The Visibility Monster looks at how you show up in Google and in AI answers and turns that into a calm plan – no ranking promises, price upfront.