Your Customers Have Stopped Googling. Here's How to Show Up in AI Answers.

TL;DR: People are asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google’s AI Overviews instead of clicking through Google results. Those tools give one answer, maybe two. AEO gets your business picked as the answer. GEO gets you mentioned, cited and recommended inside longer AI responses. If you have a website and you’re not showing up in AI answers, you’re invisible to a growing share of buyers.

Ask an AI “who’s the best accountant for a small business?” or “which booking software should I use?” and watch what happens. You don’t get ten blue links. You get a short answer with one or two names in it.

If your business isn’t one of those names, that buyer never finds you. They don’t scroll to page two. There is no page two.

The ground has already moved

This isn’t a prediction anymore. Here’s what the numbers say.

1.2 billion people use ChatGPT every week. OpenAI, reported by The Verge, September 2026.

That’s up from 800 million in October 2025 (TechCrunch). One tool, adding hundreds of millions of people in a year.

Meanwhile Google itself is answering more questions on the page, so fewer people click through to your site.

When a Google AI Overview appears, people click a regular result in 8% of visits, versus 15% without one. Pew Research Center, July 2025.

Pew also found people clicked a link inside the AI summary in just 1% of visits. The summary is the destination.

AI Overviews now cut clicks to the #1 ranked page by about 58%. Ahrefs, study of 300,000 keywords, February 2026.

Read that again. You can do everything right in traditional SEO, rank first, and still lose more than half the clicks you would have had.

Zero-click news searches rose from 56% to 69% in the year after AI Overviews launched. Similarweb data, via Search Engine Roundtable, July 2025.

And the shift in search volume is real too. Back in 2024, Gartner predicted traditional search volume would drop 25% by 2026 as people moved to AI chatbots. In 2026, Fractl’s study of over a million high-volume keywords found 29% of search volume in measurable decline. Comparison searches like “best X for Y” and “X vs Y” are falling fastest, which are exactly the searches where buyers make decisions.

18% of consumers have bought something on an AI recommendation without checking it in a search engine. Fractl, survey of 1,004 US consumers, 2026.

The same survey found 59% are likely to visit a brand’s website after an AI mentions it. Being named by the AI is the new ranking. The visit that follows is the new click.

So what are AEO and GEO?

They’re two sides of the same job: making AI understand your business well enough to recommend it.

AEO (answer engine optimisation) gets your business picked as the direct answer when someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Google’s AI Overviews a question.

GEO (generative engine optimisation) makes sure that when an AI writes a longer response, a comparison, a shortlist or a “here are some options”, it mentions you, cites you and recommends you.

Put simply: AEO wins the answer. GEO wins the mention.

Why good SEO alone isn’t enough

Traditional SEO was built for a list of links. You fought for position, and a person chose where to click.

AI tools work differently. They read across many sources, decide what’s true and who’s credible, and write one answer. To be in it, the AI has to:

• Understand who you are. What you do, who you serve, and where you fit, stated clearly and consistently.
• Trust you. Signs of real expertise and reputation, on your site and elsewhere on the web.
• Find a quotable answer. Clear, specific content that answers the questions your buyers actually ask.
• Read your site’s structure. Schema markup and clean page structure so machines can parse the facts, not guess them.

Plenty of websites rank fine on Google and still never get mentioned by an AI. Usually it’s because the site was written for keywords, not for questions.

What I did for a health tech startup

I recently did this work for a health tech startup. Health tech is one of the categories hit hardest: Fractl found 37% of health tech search volume in decline, as people take health questions straight to AI.

I restructured their site content, schema and authority signals so the LLMs understand who they are, what they do, and when to recommend them. That meant rewriting key pages around the real questions buyers ask, adding structured data that spells out the facts, and tightening the signals that tell AI models the business is credible.

Measuring it properly: GeoTracker

The hard part of AEO and GEO has always been proof. How do you know if anything changed?

So I built my own tool, GeoTracker. It asks the AI models the questions your customers ask, then tracks how often your brand shows up and how accurately the models describe you. We run it before the work and after, so you see real movement, not guesswork.

Accuracy matters as much as visibility. An AI that mentions you but gets your services wrong is still costing you customers.

What you can do this week

1. Ask the AIs about yourself. Type the questions your customers would ask into ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. Are you there? Is what they say right?
2. List your top ten buyer questions. Does your website answer each one clearly, on its own page or section?
3. Check your facts are consistent. Name, services, locations, pricing approach and credentials should match everywhere they appear online.

If the answers worry you, that’s normal. Most businesses haven’t started yet, which is exactly why now is a good time.

Let’s get you into the answer

I’m taking on a small number of AEO and GEO clients now: brands, startups and established companies that already have a website and should be showing up in AI answers, but aren’t.

Get in touch through the PCT contact form or email pingo@pingocreativetechnology.com, and I’ll run a quick check on how visible you are to the AI models right now. You can also see more of my work at kennethlooi.com.