12/06/2026
I ran 3 audits last week for new clients.
Three different industries, but the same finding every time.
The small, local businesses I work with aren't showing up in AI search. But here's the thing: neither is their competition. Not even the national or regional powerhouses that dominate them on Google.
We're talking about companies with strong domain authority, hundreds of reviews, years of SEO investment and huge ad budgets. Invisible.
The playing field just got leveled in a way I haven't seen in years.
Ahrefs just published a study of 1 billion+ AI citation data points. A few things jumped out:
đ 28.3% of pages cited by AI have zero Google organic visibility. AI isn't just pulling from the top of search... it's pulling from a completely different layer.
đ AI Overviews have cut clicks to the #1 Google result by 58%. And that number is accelerating.
đ The content types AI loves to cite: educational guides, comparison content, FAQ-format pages, and YouTube (the single highest-correlated AI visibility signal they measured).
Here's what I keep telling clients:
There's a window. And it won't stay open forever.
The businesses that move on this now are the ones who will own those AI answers in their market.
If you want to be one of them, let's talk.
