AI SEO this week: Google now shows you your AI visibility

Every week I read the SEO and AI search news so you do not have to. This is the first of a regular round-up: what happened, what it means if you run a UK business, and what to do about it in the time you actually have. I will keep opinion and evidence apart, and I will say when something is a vendor's claim rather than a fact.

Three things stood out this week. Google has given every website a report that shows how often it appears inside AI answers. The trade press has stopped arguing about whether "GEO" exists and started writing playbooks for it. And the people doing the work day to day have settled on a simple definition that I think is the right one.

What happened

1. Google's Generative AI performance report is now live for everyone

This is the one that matters. Search Console (Google's free dashboard for website owners) now has a report called Generative AI performance. Google's help page says it rolled out to all websites worldwide on 31 August 2026, and the June announcement on the Search Central blog explains the thinking behind it.

In plain English: it tells you how many times a link to your website was shown inside an AI Overview or in AI Mode on Google. You can break that down by page, by country, by device and by date.

Two honest caveats. First, it reports impressions only. It shows you how often you were displayed, not how often someone clicked. Second, you only see the report once your site has enough AI impressions to count, so a brand new site may see nothing for a while. That is not a fault. It is a baseline.

Why it matters: until now, "are we showing up in AI answers?" was a guess. Now it is a number you can read every Monday. If an agency tells you they are improving your AI visibility, this is the report they should be showing you.

Sources: Google's help page for the report and the Search Central announcement.

2. The trade press is treating GEO as a proper discipline

Search Engine Land is now running full guides on generative engine optimisation rather than explainers about whether it exists. The most thorough one went up in February, and it is worth reading with one caveat: it is a contributed piece from a software vendor, not staff editorial. So take it as a sign of where mainstream SEO thinking is heading, not as evidence of anything. The short version is that GEO is being framed as a set of repeatable tasks, not a buzzword or a separate dark art.

Source: Search Engine Land, Mastering generative engine optimisation in 2026.

3. Practitioners have settled on a definition

The SEO communities on Reddit keep landing on the same two sentences, and I agree with both:

• Classic SEO gets you into the pool of candidates. GEO decides whether you get cited in the answer.
• GEO is good SEO plus machine-readable, verifiable information about who you are and what you do.

That is practitioner opinion, not research, so treat it as such. But it is consistent across several threads, and it matches what I see on client sites.

Source: one of the clearer threads on r/seogrowth.

4. The tools conversation has moved on

A year ago people argued about whether GEO was real. Now they compare tools for tracking AI mentions and citations. Alongside that, software vendors are pushing "entity optimisation" and structured data as the most reliable levers. Some of that is true and some of it is marketing. Where a vendor shares its method, I take it seriously. Where it does not, I treat the claim as a direction of travel and nothing more.

What this means for a small business

Measurement is no longer optional. If your customers see AI Overviews when they search for what you sell, you need a baseline. The Search Console report gives you half of it for free. The other half is a short list of questions you type into ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google each month to see who gets named.

Being clear about who you are is your best defence. Big publishers win on volume. A small business wins by removing doubt. Same business name everywhere, same address format, same phone number, a proper About page, and structured data that says the same thing as the page it sits on. Assistants cite businesses they can identify without guessing.

Content needs passages an AI can lift out. A clear definition. A step-by-step. A price range. A "who this is not for". A short comparison. Those are the chunks that get quoted. Long, vague paragraphs get skipped.

Local and service businesses will feel this first. "Best plumber near me", "how much does a will cost", "how to choose an accountant": these are exactly the questions AI answers now handle. For those searches, being cited can matter as much as being clicked.

Five things to do this week

I have cut the list to what a small team can actually finish.

1. Open the report. In Search Console, go to Performance and choose the Generative AI tab. Note the number. If it says you do not have access yet, make a note of today's date and check again in a fortnight.
2. Write your 20 questions. Ten about your brand ("who is [your business]", "is [your business] any good"), ten about your category ("best [service] in [town]", "how to choose a [service]"). Ask ChatGPT and Perplexity each one. Record who gets named and which pages they link to. Repeat monthly. This takes about an hour and it is the single most useful hour you will spend on AI visibility.
3. Check your Organisation schema against your About page. Name, address, phone, email, social links. They must match word for word. If you do not know what schema your site has, paste your About page URL into Google's Rich Results Test and look at what comes back.
4. Add one "proof block" to your most important page. A short section headed "What this costs", "Who this is not for", "Common mistakes" or "How long it takes". Specific, honest, quotable.
5. Put the same facts in three places off your site. Google Business Profile, your trade association or chamber page, and one directory your industry actually uses. The same name, the same descriptor, the same link. Assistants check whether other sites agree with yours.

If you have more time, the two bigger jobs are rewriting your key service pages to answer one comparison question and one decision question each, and adding a proper author box that links to a named person with credentials.

One thing nobody can promise

Nobody can make an AI recommend your business. Anyone selling that is selling nothing. What you can do is make your business easy to identify, easy to verify and easy to quote, and then measure whether it worked. That is the whole job.

Two terms worth knowing

Generative AI performance report. Google's Search Console report showing how often links to your site appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode. Impressions only, broken down by page, country, device and date.

Citation engineering. A practitioner term for writing content so it can be safely lifted into an AI answer: clear claims, stated limits, a visible source, and no ambiguity about who is speaking.

Frequently asked questions

Is GEO different from SEO?

Not really. The foundations are the same: a fast, crawlable site, clear pages, real authority. GEO adds a layer on top. It asks whether your content is written in chunks an AI can quote, and whether the facts about your business are consistent enough for an AI to trust. If your SEO is weak, GEO will not rescue it.

Does the Google report show clicks from AI Overviews?

No. As of October 2026 it shows impressions only: how many times a link to your site was displayed inside an AI feature. It does not show clicks, and it does not include data from Google's Search Labs experiments.

How long before I see results from this kind of work?

Schema and consistency fixes can be picked up within weeks. Being named in AI answers for competitive questions takes months and depends on third-party sites agreeing with you. Anyone promising faster is guessing.

Want a second pair of eyes on your AI visibility? I run a fixed-price AI SEO audit from £495 that covers the report, the schema and the 20 questions above. Or if you would rather learn to do it yourself, the AI and SEO workshops in Dorset cover exactly this. Next week's round-up lands in the newsletter first.