118: AI Search and Google: What Actually Matters for Getting Found

In this episode, Jules White breaks down what Google is officially saying about AI search and how that compares to what is actually happening in the real world for small and local businesses.

Jules walks through Google’s guidance on AI search features, including AI Overviews and AI Mode, and explains why Google is still very much relevant despite the noise suggesting otherwise. She shares what she is seeing first-hand with client websites, where SEO foundations still play the biggest role in whether businesses are recommended by Google and AI tools like ChatGPT.

Rather than chasing shiny new AI tactics, this episode brings clarity to what really matters right now if you want your website to show up when people are actively searching for what you offer.

Key Takeaways:

• What Google says about AI search and SEO and why the basics still apply
• Why Google is not dying and still dominates search behaviour
• How AI search features actually work behind the scenes
• The SEO foundations that matter most for AI visibility
• Why internal linking, page experience, and clear messaging make a real difference
• How trust, authority, and positive sentiment across the web influence AI recommendations
• What to prioritise first if you feel overwhelmed or unsure where to start

This episode is especially useful for beauty, health, and wellness business owners who want to be found through search without relying on social media or chasing AI hacks.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Episode 087: What beauty and wellness brands must know about getting found by AI search tools
• Episode 109: Going back to basics and how to get your website showing up on Google
• Episode 116: How to spy on competitors using Google Business Profiles
• Learn how to set up and use Google Search Console with my step by step course: Google Analytics & Google Search Console Made Simple
• Book a Website Potential Discovery

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 3:56 Why Google Still Matters
• 5:48 How AI Features Work
• 8:02 Technical Requirements
• 12:08 SEO Best Practices
• 15:56 Page Experience Matters
• 20:52 Content and Images
• 23:12 Structured Data and Business Profiles
• 26:52 Measuring Performance
• 28:04 Getting Started and Building Authority

Transcript

AI-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT - MAY CONTAIN ERRORS

Introduction

Jules White: Hi, welcome back to the Website Success Show.

Today we're going to talk about what Google says about showing up in AI search. It’s Jules here again, to help you understand how to get your local business showing up in search, whether that's in Google, other search engines or in AI search.

This is the way that we want to help to connect you with your customers, right when they're searching for businesses like yours.

Now, I talked about this back in episode 87, what beauty and wellness brands must know about getting found by AI search tools. If you haven't listened to that episode, go and have a listen.

It's a good introduction to the difference between AI search and traditional search, but the reason I decided to talk about this this week in particular is Google has recently announced they've added a little page in their Google Search Central.

This is something that's accessible to everybody. You can actually go and Google, very kindly, gives you some tips on the fundamental best practices and things like that.

You don't have to go and read it because that's the kind of stuff that I do. I love geeking out on those kind of things.

And then translating it into normal person speak so you can come and listen to me and I will translate it into plain English, non-jargony sort of language.

So I thought we'd have a little look at this today. So we'll look at what Google is actually saying about how AI search features work and how it relates to your website and what I'm actually finding with clients, what parts of this need more attention and focus.

So basically Google's got this document and it says the best practices for SEO remain relevant for AI features in Google search, like AI overview and AI mode.

There are no additional requirements to appear in AI overviews or AI mode, nor other special optimisations necessary.

So I think this is a really interesting point because I am seeing lots of people who are starting to say that they're actually getting featured in ChatGPT, or they're getting clients coming through from ChatGPT.

But one thing that we need to make sure is that we are actually optimising for the basics of SEO.

So let's talk first about why Google still matters, because there's a big conspiracy theory that Google is dead or dying and it's just not true.

I hear lots of people talking about AI mode and AI optimisation and that specifically.

It’s great for people who are wanting to stand out and sell something different because it sounds much more sexy than SEO and it doesn't have those techie implications that SEO often has.

But the fundamentals are that 80% of showing up in AI search is those foundations of SEO and those fundamental best practices.

These are the things that Google is linking to directly from this document and pointing out the things that you need to have put in place if you want to show up in traditional search or in AI overviews.

Either way, you have to have done the foundations, and I've been saying this all along, that you have to make sure that the things that will help you to actually show up in SEO and in traditional search.

If you haven't done those, you are unlikely then to show up in AI mode really.

Why Google Still Matters

Jules White: So, first of all, let's talk about why Google still matters.

Google's market share, and this is a figure from sort of late 2025, Google still has around 90% to 93% of the global market share in search.

So Google often comes in as the default setting, so Google will pay companies like Apple to actually remain as the default search engine on their devices.

Many users stay with Google just because they've not switched or explored alternatives.

There's a lot to be said for it being ingrained habits with people, and especially if these are the apps that are automatically installed.

Whether you are techie or not, or if you've had something else that's been introduced to you, you might have explored something different.

But the vast majority of people out there, and then certainly if you are selling to the general public, then most people are still using Google in one form or another really.

A good percentage of Google's traffic comes from local searches.

So people out there searching for salons near me, luxury facial near me, dentists near me, those kind of things that people are out there.

They reckon that about 46% of the searches on Google offer local search intent.

So people out there looking for businesses like yours in their local area.

People will always search for what they want to buy for the problems that they want to solve.

It's just that the way people search is the thing that is changing, has changed, will continue to change and evolve over time.

How AI Features Work

Jules White: So as I'm looking through this Google search document on AI features and how it applies to your website, what they're basically saying is that the AI features like AI overviews in AI mode bring up relevant links that help people find the information they're looking for quickly and reliably.

As well as help them explore content that they might not have discovered before.

So this is where you have more opportunities for different types of sites to appear, and this is one of the good things with the AI mode moving into AI overviews and AI mode, is that it actually levels the playing field a little bit.

So small businesses have more chance of actually showing up because they probably are and might be a better option for people who are looking for local searches than big companies that have just gamed the system.

They have spent lots of money, thrown lots of money at SEO and like over-optimised and just kind of stuff loads of keywords into their websites really.

This is more about helping people to get nuanced answers and answers that are more relevant to them.

So for example, if I was looking for a facial nearby, then both Google and if I was searching in something like ChatGPT and any other AI searches, both of those understand things about me and my skin.

This is from conversations I've had, from things that I've bought in the past, from searches that I've done in the past.

So it's much more likely then to give me a specific solution that's going to help with those kind of problems as well.

So the algorithms and the bots that actually go through and crawl your website and serve those searches are so much smarter.

So they go off and in the background, they're doing hundreds, they might even be doing thousands of different searches in the background.

This is the benefit then for us as business owners is that if I have optimised my website for different searches and for more specific ways in which I can help people, then I am more likely to then show up in those searches.

So let's come on to how to appear in AI features.

Google says you can apply the same foundational SEO best practices for AI features as you do for Google search overall.

So making sure your page meets the technical requirements for Google search.

Technical Requirements

Jules White: Now, Google has three things that are the main technical requirements to be indexed in Google.

Doesn't necessarily mean to say that it's going to happen and that it will be indexed; indexing isn't guaranteed.

But number one is that the bots aren't blocked from going through your website.

Now this is something you can add into pages that you don't want to be indexed in Google.

A lot of website builders have a box you can tick that you can prevent robots from crawling through your website.

You would use this for things like thank you pages, maybe your checkout pages, so pages that you wouldn't normally expect to see in a Google search results page.

Or ones that you wouldn't want somebody coming through and directly landing on that page on your website.

You can tell Google's crawlers and AI crawlers not to put those pages in the index.

This is something, as I say, you can do in the back end of your website in some website builders.

If not, then you can add a little bit of code into your website and that will do that job for you.

So if you want your page to be indexed, then you need to make sure that that's not blocked.

You can actually see this in Google Search Console; Google will tell you whether a page is actually blocked.

Sometimes you might find errors in your Google Search Console that's telling you a page isn't able to be indexed, but that's because it's a duplicate version of that page.

So that's the first thing is basically making sure that Google can crawl through your page.

The page works is number two, so making sure that Google doesn't get an error.

So it ensures that it doesn't go to a 404 page, or it's a broken link or a redirect or something like that.

It's actually that page when Google's little robots go through and visit that page, they get through and the page loads.

And number three is the page has got indexable content on it.

Now for most website builders, you shouldn't have to worry about this if you're using a normal website builder.

If you were hand coding a website yourself or trying to upload different file types that aren't supported by Google, this could be where it could be a problem.

But realistically, for most people, that's not going to be an issue.

And then the content doesn't violate Google's spam policies, and this is where people are trying to game the system to manipulate the search rankings to actually rank content higher.

So this could be things like keyword stuffing.

It could be things like hiding content within the page.

So that always used to be a trick that people used to do, and I still sometimes hear people being advised to do this, where you might put something in your footer with keywords in it.

Then you make it either a font size of one or the same colour as the background colour.

And this is definitely a spam type policy.

Again, you shouldn't have to worry about this if you are just focusing on delivering good content that people would want to read, that a real human would want to read.

Then you shouldn't have to worry too much about spam policies and getting penalised from Google for this.

But this is where making sure you know what's going on with your website is important.

If you're using anybody who either is or isn't part of your business, making sure that they're not doing any bad practices.

And it could be that they've been advised like that as well; they've been advised to do that by somebody.

Making sure that that kind of stuff isn't happening is important.

I think this is a really good example of using people that you trust when your website is involved.

I have lots of conversations with people who have no control over their website or they rely on somebody wholeheartedly who is outside of their organisation to make changes to the website.

And you do put yourself in a bit of a vulnerable position there.

But for most businesses, then this isn't going to be a problem.

So that's the first thing is making sure Google can actually read your website and the content on there isn't spammy.

It's good that you're creating helpful, reliable people-first content.

SEO Best Practices

Jules White: So then Google moves on to SEO best practices and it says, while specific optimisation isn't required for AI overviews and AI mode, all existing SEO fundamentals continue to be worthwhile.

So I'm going to just run through these SEO fundamentals that Google is talking about so you can understand whether your website is ready to actually show up in search.

So the first one is ensuring that crawling is allowed in robots.txt, and by any content delivery network or hosting infrastructure.

So that's the one we talked about, about whether Google is actually able to go through and crawl through your webpage, and you can find this information in Google Search Console.

If you haven't set up Google Search Console, head to my website.

I've got a course there that will teach you how to set up both Google Analytics and Google Search Console.

And this is how you can find out if there are any pages that are being blocked by your website to the search engines.

This can be a real, real problem.

I've seen this before where businesses have, and big businesses as well, have had whole website moves.

And when the team have been working on the website, they've set it not to be indexable by Google.

And then they've forgotten when they moved the new site that they built, they moved that onto the main domain.

They've forgotten to turn that off.

They've forgotten to take that out, and then they wonder why the traffic drops off a cliff.

So something that is not necessarily a given, and sometimes these things get put in there by mistake, and you can find that in your Google Search Console.

Then making your content easily findable through internal links on your website.

This is one of the big opportunities that so many businesses miss out on by linking your own content together.

What it does is it helps Google and other bots to actually understand your content and the context of your content better.

Understand that you are an authority in this topic as well, so it's always going to be better if you've got pages that support your sales pages by showing that you know what you do.

Then you have links between those pages.

That's always going to be better, both for Google and for people as well.

You're going to keep people on your website for longer.

They're going to binge through your content for longer and be much more likely then to become customers with you.

So a great example of internal linking and how you can use it to really help your business is if you've got blogs on your website and you are not linking to anything that you sell from your blogs.

And I see this all the time, like 90% of the blogs that I look at, people aren't actually linking to anything that they sell.

And you can do this within the text of the blog, and that tends to be the best way that you are naturally linking to the pages that will encourage people to buy from you.

For example, if you've got a blog about how to hydrate your perimenopausal skin, then having a sentence in there when you're talking about facials as an option to help hydrate.

Having a sentence in there that then directs them to your facials page is going to make people much more likely then to actually click through and find out more about your facials and buy from you.

Page Experience Matters

Jules White: So that's definitely something that makes a difference, providing a great page experience for users.

Now, this is something that is important from an SEO point of view, but also for a conversion point of view as well.

So if our pages don't clearly explain to somebody what we do, how we're going to make their life better, what they need to do to get it within three seconds of landing on that page.

And doesn't load quickly, has got buttons that are too close together, has got font sizes that are too small.

All of these sort of things do make a difference in terms of Google actually ranking our pages.

Now, Google has over 200 ranking factors that it uses to rank web pages.

But making sure that those fundamentals are in place helps to prevent people from bouncing straight back to Google.

So if you imagine a person who's doing a search, regardless of whether that comes up in a normal traditional search results page, or AI overviews.

If they click through to your website and then it doesn't load quickly, so they've got to wait or they think your page is broken because it doesn't load.

Or the page is really hard to read or the fonts are too small or used lots of script fonts that are hard to read as well.

If you've got videos that play straight away and they're loud, all of these kind of things that can then make people immediately go back to Google, because that hasn't served that search that they were doing.

And if that happens, it sends a signal to Google that your website wasn't the right website to link to for that particular search term.

And that harms your ranking in the future.

So that's really important. We kind of think, oh, actually it's just about the words on the page.

It's just about the images on the page. It’s just about the look of the page.

People often will focus on one versus the other, but this is all about just making sure our websites give a good experience for our users.

And quite often businesses don't think about that.

They don't necessarily think about that user who's coming into their website.

They think of it more as a brochure about them and getting across what they want to say.

But if you take a step back and think about positioning your website and positioning your business as a trusted guide that can help somebody.

So your website users are out there and they have a problem that you can help them solve.

You shouldn't be making yourself the hero of the story.

Your website really is about your visitors and your customers and potential customers and about how you can hold their hand and get them from where they are right now to where they want to be.

So that's all quite a long way to say about page experience.

It's really important. This all comes into actually helping people have a good experience of using your business and using your website.

Content and Images

Jules White: So the next thing that Google says here is making sure important content is available in textual form.

So what this basically means is we need some written content on our website.

If you've got lots of images that you've created that have got text on them, then Google can't really read those images.

Google is definitely better at reading images and things, but we need our website, our content on our website to be in written form.

This also applies to things like if you're linking from your podcast to your website.

If you've got your podcast or YouTube videos embedded in your website, having the transcript on there can really help.

Even better if you've turned that transcript into a blog post that expands on what you're saying; it’s got correct headings and the hierarchy of that content on there.

I talk lots about page hierarchy and website hierarchy.

In other episodes, you can go back to episode 109 of the podcast where I talk about going back to basics and how to get your website showing up on Google.

That talks about page structure and basically what we're doing there is letting the bots that are crawling through our website know what the important parts of the text on the page are.

So that's definitely important, making sure there's something on your pages to read.

For any page that you want to be showing up in a Google search result ideally, you want a minimum of 300 or 350 words on the page if you can.

The next one is supporting your textual content with high-quality images and videos where applicable.

So this is definitely something where it can support your content on your page.

If you've just got walls of text throughout your page, that's not going to give people that good page experience that they need.

A picture can literally paint a thousand words.

So we really want our pictures and our images on our website to support what we're saying with the words.

And the same with videos as well.

Videos can be really helpful, can be very helpful for conversions as well, and helping people to understand what we do.

But not just chucking stuff on there for the sake of it.

So not just using any old stock image or AI-generated images are one of the other things right now that we see lots of on websites.

Rather than using that, make sure that the images are actually doing a job on your website.

I always come back to the example of a salon website: if you've got a section or a page talking about facials, and then you've got an image of a pedicure there.

There's a disconnect, so that immediately doesn't support what's going on on the page unless it’s a little section where you’re talking about the fact that your facials include a foot massage or something.

But if this is generally you talking about the facial treatments, you need an image that supports that as well.

Structured Data and Business Profiles

Jules White: Making sure your structured data matches the visible text on the page.

Now structured data is something we haven't covered too much on the podcast.

And essentially when websites were first created, all of the main search engines got together and they decided on this code that would allow websites to be easily understandable to the bots that are reading through them.

So it's like a universal language basically.

So structured data can be anything. It can be anything that's kind of a recognised format.

So even things like passport numbers or dates, dates and times, those sort of things can be structured data where if you see something that says 22/01/2026, then you immediately know it's a date.

And so do any machines that are reading through that also understand that as well.

So this applies to websites because we can put something in the backend code of our website; they call it schema, schema markup.

Some website builders do this automatically, and some you need to add it in manually.

If you're using FEA Create or anything, we go high level at the moment.

You have to manually add that in, so you just paste a little bit of code into your pages.

And that code—there are some websites that you can use to generate that.

In the Website Growth Club, we actually have something called a schema wizard that will help you to generate that code automatically.

And it's basically saying that this structured data that you're putting into the backend of your website is not something that's different to what's on the page.

Because otherwise that's going to again, immediately cause a mismatch.

Because Google knows that actually that's not in alignment with what's actually on that page.

And then the last one on this list is checking that your Merchant Centre and your Business Profile information is up to date.

So Google Merchant Centre isn't something that we've covered yet on the podcast, but it's something that you can use to get more sales and get more customers through Google Images, Google Search, Google Maps, YouTube.

It's where you can actually add in your physical products or digital products, and then you'll show up in those shopping results at the top of the page.

You can show up organically even if you're not paying for ads, but you will actually show up in those results at the top of the page.

Definitely something that's worth exploring if you've got a business where you're selling physical products and digital products.

Let me know if you'd like me to cover this on the podcast. You can shoot me a message and I can create an episode around this.

And then Google Business Profile is something that we have covered a lot on the podcast.

I talked about this in episode 116 where I talked about how you can spy on your competitors through their Google Business profile and understand what words to add into your website that can help you then show up in Google.

I'm very, very passionate about Google Business profiles.

Especially for local businesses, I think they're so underutilised and undervalued and you can get such fast results with them as well.

So if that's something you need some help with, definitely send me a message or connect with me and let's have a chat about how I can help you with that.

Measuring Performance

Jules White: Then it comes on to talking about how you can measure the performance of your site in AI features.

So what Google is saying is just like the rest of the search results page, sites appearing in AI features such as AI overviews and AI mode are included in the overall search traffic in Search Console.

So if you're appearing in AI overviews, you're not going to see it as a specific type of search in Google Search Console.

But it will be contributing to that data that you're seeing in terms of your performance report.

Now, you may have started already seeing in your Google Analytics data some traffic coming from AI search.

You might see ChatGPT as the source of traffic coming into your website, and I think this is really exciting.

As we start seeing more of this, then I think this is something that's good.

It's exciting. I think it'll be good when Google Search Console does actually separate out that information as well, so we can understand how we're doing in those AI overviews.

There are lots of tools out there, mostly paid, that can help you with this, but I wouldn't worry too much about it at this point.

Because what we want to focus on is the bits that are in our control.

Getting Started and Building Authority

Jules White: So the bits that are in our control are making changes to our website, optimising our website for these SEO foundations and fundamentals.

Working on our messaging and working out what people are actually searching for in relation to what we do and the problems that we solve for people.

And the kind of plain language that we need to use on our website that helps that to connect really.

And if you’re unsure where to get started with all of this, I would say to focus on those pages that are closest to the sale.

So if you haven't optimised your sales pages, your product pages, your homepage is another really important one, then that's where you start first.

First of all, make sure you're really clear on your messaging.

Make sure you understand what you do, how you're going to make people's lives better, what they need to do to get it, and also what you want to be known for.

So what do you want to show up for in the search results pages?

If you've not done work on that, then definitely think about that first, and then optimise your pages, making sure that you're actually putting those words that you want to show up for, adding them through your pages.

Now with all of this, I think one of the things that I've seen from what's going on in SEO communities and from like the buzz that's out there about it.

Is that when tools like ChatGPT are actually looking for who to recommend, yes, you've got to have these foundations in place, so you've got to have your SEO fundamentals in place.

But the thing that seems to make the difference between those businesses being recommended or not, the ones that have got the foundations in place, they're already being indexed somewhere in Google even if it's on page five.

Then the trust and showing that you are an authority in what you do, and especially trust from elsewhere on the internet, which you can do through PR, through guesting, guest blogging, guest podcasting.

Basically what the AI bots are better at doing is going out there and seeing if you have overall a positive sentiment about your business across the internet.

Also whether you are the most relevant business.

So if you are the most relevant with what your business does for what that person, that unique search that that person is doing, then you're much more likely to show up in AI overviews.

So I think focusing on getting these foundations in place and then thinking about ways that you can grow the positive sentiment about your business throughout the internet, that you can grow your authority.

That you can show you know what you're doing and why you are an expert that can help people.

And if you want to find out more about how I can help you with this and move from feeling stuck with how to get your website showing up in search to actually having clarity around the next steps that you need to take.

Then book a website potential discovery call.

You can go to my website, thewebsitesuccesshub.com to book a call, and we can have a chat about where you are, where you're stuck right now.

If any of my products or services can help you to get there a little bit faster, we can chat about that as well.

So I hope this has been helpful and let me know if you are already getting customers coming through AI searches.

Or if you're not sure, if you're not sure what's happening, then let me know.

You can text the show or send me a message wherever we're connected and I'll see you soon. Bye.

Would you like me to create a summary of the key SEO foundations mentioned in this transcript to use as a checklist for your website?