Try this tonight. Search “damp specialist Exeter” on your phone and count how far you scroll before you reach the first ordinary website link. For plenty of searches there’s now an AI Overview sat right at the top, and in late August Google confirmed that some of those overviews will expand automatically into a much longer answer, no “Show more” button needed. On a phone screen that can push a roofer in Pinhoe or a kitchen fitter in Alphington well out of sight.
This isn’t a small experiment any more. Google says AI Overviews now reach more than 2.5 billion people a month, and its separate AI Mode has passed one billion. So the question for a trade website isn’t just “am I number one?” It’s “what’s sitting above me, and is my site being quoted in it?”
There’s some good news. On 31st August Google rolled out its generative AI reports in Search Console worldwide. For the first time you can see which of your pages show up in AI Overviews and AI Mode, with impressions broken down by page, device and country. There’s also a new setting to opt out of AI features altogether. Google says opting out won’t affect your normal rankings, but you’d lose any AI visibility, so we’d hold off until you’ve had a few weeks of data to look at.
And what does it mean for the website itself? Pages that answer a question plainly get picked up. A heading like “How long does a boiler service take?” followed by a straight, honest answer does more than a paragraph of sales talk. Add LocalBusiness schema markup so Google knows your service area covers Heavitree, St Thomas and Topsham. Keep pages quick, with images compressed to WebP so they load on patchy 4G in a Marsh Barton car park.
If you’d like your website checked over with all this in mind, the Simply Digital team at Website Design Exeter would be happy to help. Drop us a line.