Last week, at Google I/O in Mountain View, the company's vice president of Search stood on stage and said the quiet part out loud: "Google Search is AI Search."
Not part of it. All of it.
If you missed the announcement, you weren't alone. I/O is mostly a developer event, and the headlines that escaped the bubble were the usual AI fare: a new model called Gemini 3.5 Flash, smart glasses, an AI shopping cart that follows you across the internet. Easy to file under "another week, another AI announcement" and get on with your morning.
But this one is worth paying attention to. Not because the world has ended, and not because your website is now obsolete. It's worth paying attention to because the way people find businesses online has been quietly rewritten over the last 18 months, and last week was Google formally signing off on the new map.
I run a small web studio in Norfolk. Most of my clients are real businesses doing real work: builders, accountants, restaurants, holiday lets, solicitors, and charities. The kind of businesses that have spent the last decade being told to "get a website" and "do SEO" and that have, broadly, done so. They don't need a panic post. They need a clear-eyed account of what's changed, what hasn't, and where to spend their attention next.
Here's mine.
The actual change
For 25 years, Google did one thing well. You typed something in, and it gave you ten candidates, and you clicked one. That was the deal. The whole SEO industry, the whole "how to be found online" conversation, was built on that deal.
The deal has changed.
What people now get when they search depends on what they're asking. For factual questions ("how do I unclog a drain", "what's the best way to clean leather", "when is mother's day this year"), Google now answers them directly at the top of the page with an AI-generated summary. The ten blue links are still there, but they're below the fold, and most people never scroll. The numbers on this are reasonably consistent across the research: click-through rates on the top organic result fall by somewhere between 40% and 60% when one of these AI summaries appears.
For commercial questions ("hire a plumber in Norwich", "best web design studio Norfolk", "buy a yoga mat"), the picture is different. Google is more cautious here, because these are the searches that actually make people money, both Google and everyone else. The AI summaries appear on roughly 17% of commercial queries, and on around 10% of navigational ones, when someone is searching for a specific business by name.
So far, broadly familiar territory if you've been paying attention. What was new last week was the scale of the ambition.
Google announced that AI Mode (its conversational, follow-up-question-friendly version of search) has crossed a billion monthly users in a year. It also announced what it called Generative UI in Search: the ability for the search results page itself to assemble custom layouts, interactive tools, and "mini-apps" in response to a question, rather than just showing you links. Ask a complex question (planning a holiday, comparing options, working out which appliance to buy), and Google will increasingly build you a small bespoke interface on the spot, rather than send you off to ten websites to do the work yourself.
That's a meaningful shift. It changes what a website is for.
The bit that's bad news
I'll be honest about what this means.
Informational content (the article that explains "what is X", the blog post that lists "the five best ways to Y") is in trouble. Not dead, but trending in that direction. If Google can answer the question itself, in the search result, drawing on dozens of sources, the case for clicking through to one of those sources weakens every quarter. Publishers (newspapers, magazines, content sites) are already seeing this in their traffic. Referrals from Google search to publisher sites globally were down 33% year on year, according to data published in the Reuters Institute's most recent journalism report.
If your business depends on writing blog posts that rank for general informational questions, that's getting harder.
The bit that's better news than you'd think
Now the part most of the panic posts skip.
Most small businesses are not publishers. They don't make their money from people reading articles. They make their money from people looking for someone to do a thing, in a place, at a price, and then hiring them.
And that kind of search, the commercial, local, transactional kind, is where AI summaries appear least. The data on this is encouraging. When a search includes a location name ("Norwich", "near me", "North Norfolk"), the rate at which an AI Overview appears drops sharply. The local map pack (those three businesses with addresses and ratings) still dominates the screen. People searching for an electrician in Stalham are not getting an AI summary that fixes their socket. They are getting three local electricians with phone numbers.
That isn't because Google has decided to be kind to small businesses. It's because the technology doesn't yet know how to replace the local market. It can summarise a Wikipedia article. It cannot show up at your house at four o'clock on a Tuesday.
For the kinds of businesses I work with, the local-search side of all this is, for the moment, holding up. The Google Business Profile, the reviews, the consistent name and address and phone number everywhere on the web, are if anything more important than they were a year ago.
What does need to change
Two things, both quietly important.
First, your website has to be readable by AI. Not optimised for it in some dark-arts sense, but written and structured so that when Google or ChatGPT or Claude is asked about your business, they have something clean to work from. Clear headings that ask real questions. First paragraphs that answer them in plain English. Schema markup that tells the AI what your business is, where it is, and what it does. Consistent descriptions of your business everywhere it appears online: your site, your Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, and the local chamber listing.
There's a name for this discipline. It's called AEO, Answer Engine Optimisation, and it's the work of being the thing the AI cites when it answers a question. It's quiet, technical work, and it doesn't promise rankings. It promises that when AI is forming a picture of your business, which it now is, whether you like it or not, it's working from accurate, current, and well-structured information.
Second, your website needs to do something. Last week's announcements made it clearer than ever that a static brochure site, the kind that says "here's what we do, here's our number, please call", is going to feel weaker over time. Not because brochure sites are bad. Plenty of mine still are, broadly, brochure sites. They're weaker because the customers landing on them will increasingly have come from an AI that already told them what you do. They'll arrive further down the funnel, expecting more than a phone number. A booking flow. A quote calculator. A proper contact form that asks the right questions. A way to do the next thing, not just learn about you.
The websites that earn their keep over the next few years will be the ones that work harder once a visitor arrives.
What we're doing about it
A short note on what this means at BrainWeb, because it would be odd not to say. We've been quietly retooling. The technical SEO and AEO work is now part of how we build, not an afterthought to be bolted on later. New sites going out are structured for AI extraction from day one: schema, answer-first content, and an llms.txt file at the root that points the AI agents to the pages that actually matter. We're also having more conversations with existing clients about adding interactive elements (booking, proper enquiry flows, the occasional calculator where it earns its place) to sites that have been brochure-style for years.
None of this is revolutionary. It's just where the work has moved.
The honest takeaway
I keep coming back to the same thought when I think about the I/O announcements. Google has stopped being a place you go to find a website. It's becoming a place you go to get an answer, and your website is one of the sources that the answer is built from.
That's a different job for a website. It's not, yet, a smaller job, and for local businesses doing real-world work, the change is more gradual than the headlines suggest. But the websites that are going to pull their weight over the next few years are the ones that are written and built for both kinds of reader: the person, and the machine that is increasingly summarising for the person.
Modern tools, sensibly used. Where they earn their keep, never because they're shiny. That's been the BrainWeb position for a long time, and last week's news, if anything, made it look more right than it did a fortnight ago.
If you've read this far and you're wondering whether your own site is set up for any of this, that's a proper chat. Get in touch.