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VelvetGiraffe

AI search: what actually changes for an SME

Author
Sarah-Jane Lewis
Published
Published 18 May 2026
Updated
Updated 2 July 2026
Reading time
5 min read

Assistants summarise rather than list. That changes what your site needs to say — and how clearly it needs to say it.

From ten blue links to one answer

When a customer asks an assistant for a recommendation, they get a short answer, not a page of options. Being included in that answer depends on whether a machine can confidently describe what you do, who you serve and why you're credible.

The practical work

Make your entity information unambiguous and consistent. Describe services factually on their own pages. Answer real customer questions in plain language. Use structured data where it genuinely applies — Organization, Service, Article, and FAQ only when the content is a real FAQ.

None of this is exotic. It's the same discipline good SEO always required, applied with the assumption that the reader may be a machine writing a summary.

What not to do

Don't publish volume for its own sake. Thin content written for algorithms reads badly to humans and gets ignored by assistants that are optimising for usefulness.

Curious how this applies to your business?

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The bigger picture

See the bigger picture?

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