How to get your business into Google's AI answers

Someone searches "air conditioner repair near me" and the first thing they see is not a list of websites but a ready answer that AI has assembled from several sources, with links to those sources underneath.

For a business, that means one thing: either your site is one of the sources, or the customer may never scroll down to where you rank.

What has changed in search

• The answer sits right in the results. Some people get what they need and don't click anywhere.
• Sources get the most valuable clicks. Whoever does click through is already interested and arrives with a specific question.
• Buying searches are affected too. Industry data from 2025 shows AI Overviews on more than half of Google searches, and more than half of those searches have commercial intent.
• You can't buy the spot. The same data shows no ads on 72% of searches with an AI Overview. A place in the answer has to be earned with content.

McKinsey estimates that 20–50% of search traffic is at risk from searches that end without a click. The sites that feed the answers are the ones that keep their share.

Where AI takes its answers from

An AI Overview is built from pages Google considers reliable and easy to understand. It readily quotes text with a direct answer, clear figures, lists and tables. "We are a team of professionals with an individual approach" will never be quoted: there is nothing in it to quote.

For local searches ("near me", "in Lisbon", "open now") Google pulls data from the business's Maps profile: opening hours, services, reviews, photos.

A one-month plan in 7 steps

1. Collect customer questions. Write down 20 questions people ask you by phone and in chats. Those are the searches AI is trying to answer.
2. Answer each one directly. The first sentence of a section is the answer, then the details. "How much does it cost?" — "From €90, depending on…".
3. One topic, one page. Service, prices, questions and answers on separate pages with clear headings.
4. Add structured data. Schema.org markup tells Google where the service, price, address and FAQs are.
5. Complete your Google Business Profile. Categories, services with descriptions, hours, photos, replies to reviews.
6. Show real experience. Case studies, figures, photos of your work, who wrote the page. Google favours sources that show why they can be trusted.
7. Track the results. In Search Console, see which searches you appear for and how many clicks you get. When the picture changes, update your pages.

What not to do

• Don't mass-produce AI pages without review. Google lowers trust in the whole site, not just those pages.
• Don't write for robots. AI Overviews quote what makes sense to a person.
• Don't expect it to happen on its own. A site without structure or markup simply gets skipped.

Example: where enquiries come from

For one of our clients, a driving school, 13 of 22 real enquiries in August 2026 came from search — and none from paid ads. What worked were pages built around specific student questions, a glossary of terms and a complete Google profile. Exactly the kind of pages AI quotes.

Where to start today

Open your website and ask: does it give a direct answer to your customers' three most common questions? If not, start there. If you'd rather have it done systematically, see how we handle SEO and Google Business Profiles. And if customers ask the same things over and over, read about an AI consultant on your website.