SEO in 2026: how to show up on Google and in AI assistant answers

What changed in search?

More and more searches end without a click. SparkToro’s study using Datos data found that about 60% of Google searches in the United States and the European Union end without a visit to any website (SparkToro, 2024). When an AI summary appears, organic clicks drop even further on informational queries: a Seer Interactive analysis of more than 3,000 queries measured a drop of close to 61% (Dataslayer, study summary).

The change has reached Spanish too: Google launched AI Mode in Spanish for Argentina and all of Latin America in September 2025 (Mercado).

So has SEO stopped working?

It’s still the foundation. AI summaries almost always cite pages that already rank among the top results, and ChatGPT relies heavily on Bing’s index (The Digital Bloom). What changes is which queries are worth targeting.

Generic questions like “what is a CRM” get answered without a click. Decision questions still bring visits: how much it costs, which one to choose, how long it takes, who does it in my city or in my language. That’s where a small business can win.

What makes content get cited?

An academic study from Princeton and other universities on what they called GEO (generative engine optimization) tested which changes increase a page’s visibility in generated answers. The techniques that worked best were adding statistics, direct quotes and verifiable sources, and in their tests visibility improved by up to 40% (Aggarwal et al., arXiv).

In practice, that means:

• Opening each page with a direct answer of two or three lines.
• Using subheadings that are the questions your customers ask.
• Giving concrete facts: timelines, price ranges, steps, dates.
• Linking to the source of every figure.
• Showing who wrote the page and when it was last updated.

Why does it matter that people talk about your brand off your site?

Ahrefs analyzed 75,000 brands and found that brand mentions across the web correlate more strongly with visibility in AI Overviews than backlinks do (a correlation of 0.66 versus 0.22) (Ahrefs). It’s a correlation, not a recipe, but it confirms something logical: assistants recommend businesses that other people talk about.

For a small business, that means having complete, consistent profiles on Google Business Profile, Bing Places, LinkedIn and the directories in your industry, asking for reviews after every project and showing up in media, podcasts or communities in your field.

Which technical adjustments are worth making?

• Make sure the content is visible in the HTML without relying on JavaScript, because several crawlers don’t run it.
• Allow the crawlers you want reading your site in robots.txt (Googlebot, Bingbot and the assistants’ crawlers).
• Structured data (Organization, Service, Article, FAQPage) to describe clearly who you are. It helps them understand you, though on its own it doesn’t guarantee citations.
• A fast site with language versions properly marked up with hreflang.

Google makes clear that it doesn’t penalize text for how it was written but for its quality: what it looks for is content created to help people, not made just to rank (Google Search Central).

Frequently asked questions