A billion people a month are now searching Google with AI. If you're not being cited, you're not being found.
Google held its annual I/O developer conference this week, Ive just read through their email and the announcements related to its search engine buried inside it deserve more attention from small business owners than they're getting.
Here's the headline number.
Just one year after launching AI Mode, Google now has over one billion monthly users running searches through its AI. Query volume has more than doubled every quarter since launch, and last quarter the total number of searches hit an all-time high.
Read that again.
People aren't searching less because of AI. They're searching more. And the way they're searching has fundamentally changed.
What Google actually announced
There’s three things that I can see that matter for your business:
A reimagined Search box. It's the biggest change to the Search box in over 25 years. It dynamically expands so users can describe what they actually want in full sentences, not three-word keyword stubs. They can drop in images, files, videos, or pull from Chrome tabs as part of the query. The new default model is Gemini 3.5 Flash, rolled out globally from this week.
Conversational follow-ups. Users can ask a follow-up directly from an AI Overview and slide straight into AI Mode for a back-and-forth conversation. Google's own line is the one to pay attention to: "Your context stays with you, and as you explore more deeply, the links and supporting articles get even more relevant."
Search agents. Information agents that run in the background, monitoring blogs, news sites, social posts, finance data, and shopping listings for changes related to a specific question. They synthesise updates and send them to the user. Rolling out to Pro and Ultra subscribers this summer.
The bit small business owners need to actually understand
That line about "the deeper you dig, the more relevant the links" to me is the whole game.
SEO as we know it (what I’d' call old SEO) was about simply being ranked number one for "plumber Worcester" ro whatever your key search term is.
New AI search is about being the source Google's model trusts enough to cite when someone asks, "I've got an old radiator that hisses when the heating comes on, the pressure keeps dropping, and I think the boiler might need re-pressurising. Can someone in Worcester come and look at it this week, and what should I expect to pay?"
Those two queries are not the same.
The first is a keyword match. The second is a context-rich, multi-part question that Google's AI breaks down, reasons across, and answers by pulling specific snippets from specific pages, with links sitting alongside them.
If your website is built to rank purely for keywords, it might still rank. But it won't get cited. And the citation is where the clickthrough is beginning to live. Less for locally focussed businesses right now butI would epxect this to change.
Simply look at the adoption of ChatGBT, then look at how it moved so quickly to become used for search and you’ll see the pattern of how search is changing.
Why this matters more for small businesses than for the big players
Big brands have brand search baked in. People type "Screwfix" because they already know Screwfix. The vast majority of small business search opportunity has always sat in the long tail, the specific question, the local context, the niche problem.
That long tail is exactly what AI search amplifies. The deeper and more specific the user's question, the more likely Google's AI is to pull from a long, specific page on a small website rather than from a thin, generic page on a corporate one.
But only if the page actually exists, is structured properly, and is recognisable to the model as a credible source.
What to actually do about it
A few practical points, none of them new, all of them more urgent than they were a week ago:
Write content that answers full questions, not keywords. If you sell replacement door locks in Manchester, you need a page that addresses "what's the best replacement door lock for a tradtional farm door in an old cottage", not just "door locks Manchester".
Get your schema markup sorted. Structured data is how you tell Google's AI what your page actually is, who you are, what you charge, what other people have said about you. Without it, you're invisible to the model in any structured sense. Service schema, FAQ schema, review schema, organisation schema, product schema. All of it.
Build trust signals the model can actually read. Real reviews with structured data. Real author bios. Real business information that matches across your site, Google Business Profile, and the rest of the web. Inconsistency makes you look like a low-trust source.
Stop thinking in pages, start thinking in answers. Every page on your site should be the best possible answer to a specific question a customer might ask. If a page doesn't answer a question, it's not earning its keep.
Get your Google Business Profile fully populated. Hours, services, products, photos, posts, the lot. It's the foundation of local AI citation.
It all comes back to one thing, it’s called Topical Authority which I’ve been writing about in The Digital Debrief for years ( and banging the drum loudly about it with my clients - sorry clients!) and it’s actually a really really simple thing to understand:
If Google sees your business website as the authority on its topic then it will refer to it when someone wants to find out something. That meant previouslly it would refer to it in its search results. Today that means it will refer to it in it’s AI search results.
Trust me on this, if you’re not on the case you will get left behind.
The bottom line
A billion people a month are now interrogating Google through AI rather than typing keywords. They're asking longer, more specific questions, and they're getting more specific answers with more specific links.
The businesses being cited in those answers are winning the clicks. The ones who haven't structured their site for that shift are quietly losing visibility without ever seeing a ranking drop, because the ranking system itself is no longer the only game.
If you've been putting off the SEO conversation because the old model felt like a lottery, the new model is more deterministic than people realise. It rewards depth, specificity, structure, and trust. All of which are within reach of any small business willing to take it seriously.
The window to get ahead of competitors who are still treating this as next year's problem is open right now. It won't be open for long.
Here to help if you’re business needs it.
Thanks for reading,
Ollie
(Source: Google's I/O 2026 announcement, "A new era for AI Search", Elizabeth Reid, VP Search, 19 May 2026)
