What Is AI Search,
and Does Your Firm Appear In It?

Search has changed more in the last two years than in the previous ten, and most professional services firms haven’t noticed yet.

When someone searches Google today, a large share of those searches never result in a click to any website at all. The answer appears directly on the results page, generated by AI, and the searcher gets what they need without visiting anyone’s site. Industry data from SparkToro, Bain, and Semrush consistently puts the overall zero-click rate at roughly 60 to 68% of all Google searches in 2026, rising sharply to around 83% when an AI Overview appears, and higher still in Google’s AI Mode.

What that actually means for your firm

If your firm’s visibility strategy is built entirely around getting clicks to your website, a large and growing share of the people searching for what you do will never see that website at all. They’ll see an AI-generated answer instead, built from whichever sources the AI decided were specific and trustworthy enough to cite.

That’s the real shift. The competition isn’t just for a ranking position anymore. It’s for whether an AI system decides your firm is specific and credible enough to mention by name when it answers someone’s question.

Why generic content loses in this environment

An AI system generating an answer needs something concrete to cite. Vague marketing language — the kind found on most professional services homepages — gives it nothing to work with. “Trusted, experienced, tailored solutions” isn’t a fact an AI can repeat with confidence, because it isn’t a fact at all. A specific, verifiable claim — a real number, a named service, a clear answer to a clear question — is something an AI can actually cite.

This is the same principle that makes content work for a human reader. It just now also determines whether a machine mentions you at all.

What to actually do about it

1. Write content that answers specific questions in plain, direct language — the same way you’d answer a client’s question out loud.
2. Use structured data (schema markup) so machines can parse what your page is actually about, not just what it looks like to a human.
3. Keep facts about your firm consistent and specific everywhere they appear, since inconsistency is as confusing to an AI system as it is to a person.
4. Build a small number of genuinely specific pages rather than a large number of generic ones. Specificity is what gets cited. Volume alone doesn’t. We’re building a dedicated tool to check this, coming soon in our free tools.

Common questions

Is AI search optimisation the same as SEO?

Related, but not identical. Traditional SEO optimises for ranking in a list of links. Optimising for AI search — sometimes called Generative Engine Optimisation, or GEO — means optimising for being the source an AI system chooses to cite or summarise, which doesn’t always correlate with traditional ranking position.

Can I check if my firm currently appears in AI search results?

Yes, by testing your own likely search queries directly in tools like Google’s AI Overview, ChatGPT, or Perplexity, and seeing whether your firm is mentioned, cited, or absent entirely. We’re building a dedicated tool for this, coming soon on this site.