A buyer looking for a consultant, a software partner or a supplier used to type a few words into Google, open five tabs, and compare websites. Increasingly, they ask an AI assistant instead. In a few seconds they get an answer that names three or four companies and explains why.
Either your company is in that answer, or it is not. And unlike a search results page, there is no second page to scroll to.
This changes what a website is for. It is no longer only a brochure for people. It is also a source that AI systems read, summarize and cite on your behalf, often before a human ever arrives.
How Buyers Search Now
How Buyers Find Companies Now
In February 2024, Gartner predicted that traditional search engine volume would drop 25% by 2026 as AI chatbots and virtual agents became substitute answer engines. Whether or not that exact figure holds, the direction is clear.
OpenAI reports that more than 900 million people use ChatGPT every week. Google says its AI Overviews reached more than 2 billion monthly users in 2025. Semrush tracked AI Overviews across more than 10 million keywords and found they appeared on 6.49% of queries in January 2025, rising to 24.61% by July, and spreading from simple informational questions into commercial and transactional ones.
Business buyers have moved fastest. Forrester's 2025 buyer research found that 94% of business buyers use AI somewhere in their buying process. G2's April 2026 survey of more than 1,000 software buyers found that 51% now start their research with an AI chatbot more often than with Google, up from 29% a year earlier, and 71% use AI chatbots at some point in their research.
Fewer Clicks, Higher Stakes
When an AI answer appears, people click less. Pew Research Center analyzed nearly 69,000 real Google searches and found that users who saw an AI summary clicked on a traditional result in 8% of visits, compared with 15% for those who did not. They clicked on a link inside the summary itself in just 1% of visits.
Ahrefs found that AI Overviews correlate with a 58% lower click-through rate for the page ranked first. Seer Interactive measured organic click-through rates on queries with AI Overviews falling 61% over fifteen months.
The same Seer research contains the more important finding. When a brand is cited inside the AI Overview, it earns 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks than brands that are not cited.
Ranking is no longer the goal on its own. Being the source the AI cites is.
The traffic that does arrive is also further along. Someone who clicks through from an AI answer has usually already compared options, read a summary of what you do, and decided you are worth a closer look.
The Decision Is Made Before the First Call
Buyers have been doing more of their research alone for years. AI has accelerated it.
6sense's 2025 study of more than 4,000 B2B buyers found that the vendor buyers favour before first contact wins the deal roughly 80% of the time. Gartner found that 61% of B2B buyers prefer a buying experience without a sales rep at all.
Gartner also found that 69% of B2B buyers report inconsistencies between what a company's website says and what its sellers tell them. That matters even more when an AI system is reading your site. If your website, your LinkedIn page and your directory listings describe you differently, the AI has less reason to trust any of them.
What AI Systems Need From Your Website
Most of what makes a website readable to AI is good practice that many sites skip. These are the areas we focus on.
Content in the page itself. Many AI crawlers read only the HTML a server sends and do not run JavaScript. If your services, case studies or answers only appear after a script loads, or after a click, there is a good chance the AI never sees them.
Facts that match everywhere. Your company description, service names, locations and key figures should read the same on every page and every profile. Consistency builds confidence. Contradictions remove it.
Answers to the questions buyers actually ask. AI assistants are asked questions, so pages that answer questions clearly get used. Specific FAQs, written in plain language, are one of the most useful things a service business can publish.
Proof with specifics. Case studies with real results, named clients where permitted, and clear outcomes give an AI something concrete to cite. Vague claims give it nothing.
Structured data. Schema markup tells search engines and AI systems exactly what a page describes: your organization, your services, your articles and authors, your FAQs. It removes guesswork.
Clear authorship and dates. Content with a named author and a publication date is easier to trust and easier to cite.
Speed and mobile performance. Slow pages are crawled less and abandoned more, by people and machines alike.
Then measure it. Track visits that arrive from AI assistants, test the questions your buyers would ask, and check whether you appear in the answers.
We Built Our Own Site This Way
Innavera's website is built on these principles. Every page is rendered on the server, so the full text is in the HTML. Our organization, services, articles, case studies, team and FAQs are described with structured data. We publish plain-text summaries of the site written specifically for AI assistants, and we keep our company description and figures consistent across every page.
We did not do this as an experiment. We did it because our own clients, and theirs, are increasingly finding suppliers this way.
How Innavera Helps
Website design, development and management is one of the three core services in our Growth Partnership. We build sites that are designed to convert and built to be found on Google and AI search, with technical SEO, structured data, and content written to be cited by tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity. Lead capture connects to your CRM and follow-up, and the site is improved every month based on real data.
Because Growth Partnership also covers AI integration and product development, connected to Intelain, Innavera's business intelligence platform, your website is not a separate project. It is part of one system that one team is accountable for.
Find out how AI sees your business
Book a free 30-minute Growth Diagnostic. We will look at your current setup, your goals and where things are stuck, and you will leave with three priorities, whether or not you work with us.
References
- OpenAI (2026). "Scaling AI for Everyone." openai.com
- Pew Research Center (2025). "Google Users Are Less Likely to Click on Links When an AI Summary Appears in the Results." pewresearch.org
- G2 (2026). "The Answer Economy: How AI Search Is Rewiring B2B Software Buying." g2.com
- Gartner (2025). "Gartner Sales Survey Finds 61% of B2B Buyers Prefer a Rep-Free Buying Experience." gartner.com
- Gartner (2024). "Gartner Predicts Search Engine Volume Will Drop 25% by 2026, Due to AI Chatbots and Other Virtual Agents." gartner.com
- Alphabet (2025). CEO remarks on Q2 2025 earnings. blog.google
- Semrush (2025). "Semrush AI Overviews Study." semrush.com
- Forrester (2026). "B2B Buyers Make Zero-Click Number One." forrester.com
- Ahrefs (2026). Study of AI Overviews and click-through rates across 300,000 keywords. ahrefs.com
- Seer Interactive (2025). "AIO Impact on Google CTR: September 2025 Update." seerinteractive.com
- 6sense (2025). "The B2B Buyer Experience Report for 2025." 6sense.com
Cover photo by Firmbee.com on Unsplash
