Google sends fewer clicks now. Here is how to get picked by AI.

For twenty years the deal was simple: rank on Google, get the click. That deal is fading. Google now puts an AI-written summary at the top of many results, and tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Copilot answer questions directly.

Pew Research Center tracked the real browsing of 900 adults in the United States for a month. When a Google search showed an AI summary, people clicked on a normal search result in 8% of visits. Without a summary, they clicked in 15%. They clicked a link inside the summary itself in just 1% of visits, and were more likely to end their browsing session altogether.

Each tool works a little differently, but they share a pattern. They search an index of the web, pull the passages that best answer the question, and write a summary, often with links to where the information came from.

So the question becomes: is your page the easiest, most trustworthy place to find that answer? Google's own guidance is refreshingly plain. To appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode there are no additional requirements and no special optimisations. The page has to be indexed and eligible to show a snippet, and the usual good practice applies: let it be crawled, link to it from your other pages, give visitors a good experience, keep the important content as text, and make sure any structured data matches what people can see.

• Answer the question in the first linesIf a page is about "how much does X cost", say the answer near the top in one or two plain sentences, then explain. AI tools love a clean, quotable answer.
• Use headings that match real questionsWrite headings the way customers ask: "How long does it take?", "Who is it for?". Each section should make sense on its own, because AI tools often lift a single section.
• Add a short FAQ to important pagesFive honest questions and direct answers cover the follow-ups people ask an assistant.
• Show you know what you are talking aboutReal numbers, examples, your own experience and links to reliable sources make a page more trustworthy to people and to machines.
• Let the crawlers inCheck that your robots.txt and your hosting or CDN do not block search engines or AI crawlers you want to be found by, and that pages load quickly.
• Get mentioned elsewhereAI tools lean on what other sites say about you: reviews, directories, industry articles, partner pages and interviews. A consistent name, description and contact details everywhere helps.
• Tell search engines about new pagesSubmit your sitemap in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, and use IndexNow, which notifies Bing and others the moment a page changes. Bing's index also feeds Microsoft Copilot.
• Consider an llms.txt fileA short Markdown summary of your site at /llms.txt. It is a proposal rather than a settled standard, but it takes ten minutes and does no harm.

You cannot improve what you do not watch. Two simple habits cover most businesses:

1. Check your analytics monthly. In Google Analytics, look at traffic by source for referrers like chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, copilot.microsoft.com and gemini.google.com. These visitors are often few but well informed.
2. Ask the assistants. Make a list of ten questions your customers really ask. Every month, ask them in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot and Google, and note whether you are mentioned and which page is linked.

If a competitor keeps getting quoted instead of you, read the page they are quoted from. It usually answers the question more directly, and that tells you exactly what to improve.