Like Chicken Licken, who believes the sky is falling after an acorn falls on her head, I’m noticing a trend of marketing agencies contacting small and midsize businesses (SMBs) using fear to scare SMB owners into thinking they need to dramatically change their SEO strategy or their websites.
- Video headlines and blogs scream that SEO and websites are dead. The homicidal maniac who killed them? AI.
- Emails sent to SMBs claim they aren’t being found in chatbot responses for lengthy search terms that are barely relevant to the company.
- One company even persuaded an owner to switch his HTML site completely to JavaScript! (Sigh. JavaScript-heavy frameworks are notoriously harder and more resource-intensive for search engine bots to render than standard semantic HTML.) It will almost surely lock that company into using a single vendor.
And like Foxy Loxy, who offers Chicken Licken (aka Chicken Little or Henny Penny, depending on the version of the fable), so-called “help” to get to the king, these companies are ready to swoop in and save the panicked SMB owner to be part of the next generation of search. (Instead, Foxy Loxy lures the frightened chicken and her friends into his lair, where he eats them for dinner.)
Yes, the metaphor is intentional.
Fear Tactics and AI Marketing
Fear has long been used as an effective motivator and advertising tactic. Fear of missing out, or FOMO, is real.
At the same time, technology is changing more rapidly than ever before.
It’s not easy for business owners to sort out the truth.
For that matter, it’s difficult for honest, seasoned SEOs, web designers, and marketers to sort out the truth!
Indeed, it’s challenging to separate fact from fiction.
We believe SMBs need to understand AI, SEO, and their businesses. They need to know:
- What’s the Same With SEO in an AI World
- What’s Emphasized Even More
- What’s Changed
- What’s Emerging
Fear of missing out, or FOMO, is real. This has made it increasingly challenging for business owners to sort out the truth about AI SEO.
AI and SEO Now: What’s the Same
It’s not new!
Google has long been using AI for search.
For example, 8 years ago, Google introduced its large language model, BERT (a type of AI), and it has been using machine learning (another type of AI) since 2001. That’s a quarter of a century ago.
It’s precisely why Google is so good at giving you the answer you want.
For example, it understands that the majority of the people who search for “apple” are not looking for fruit but for a technology company.
Furthermore, it understands that people stay on useful content longer and do not “re-Google” a different term if they found what they were looking for. It then ranks that content preferably. (Business owners can see a proxy for this in their Google Analytics data.)
To address all the AI SEO hype, Google recently published an AI Search Optimization Guide (Its full name is the less-than-catchy, “Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search.” I suspect Google’s brand team was not involved in the naming.)
What’s the Same With SEO in an AI World
For the most part, the same hundreds of SEO and website principles we have been proclaiming for the past decade remain the same. It’s still SEO. Honestly, SEO doesn’t even need a new name. (Of course, that hasn’t stopped savvy marketers from dubbing it: AEO, GEO, AIO, and LLMO.)
What’s the Same, But Emphasized More With AI Overviews
While the listed items below have long been among the hundreds of Google recommendations, the AI Optimization Guide specifically calls out the following:
1. Provide a unique point of view (POV).
Don’t simply publish what you can find elsewhere on the internet. This is called “commodity” content. Avoid it.
For example, when writing a blog, the expert should be the author. This is why, as an agency, we interview expert company authors in order to write their website content.
Google wants to hear the “war stories” and the expert, authoritative, and trustworthy opinion and experience.
2. Organize content to help readers (and bots).
I would add that the subtext here is that, yes, it should be organized for readers, but it should also be structured cleanly for search bots and AI chatbots to follow and parse the pages easily.
AI bots must be able to parse website pages. Properly optimized HTML sites make this easiest. For example, check out these semantic HTML guidelines from Search Engine Journal and Jono Alderson.
Write your own content.
Can you use AI to help generate ideas and more? Absolutely.
But if AI is writing your content from beginning to end, you can guarantee that it is commodity content that will be overlooked. Again, Google offers guidance about using AI-generated content on your website.
3. Use high-quality videos and images.
Video is the wave of the present. If you’re not using video, you’re living in the past.
Plus, video is difficult for AI to replicate, so it can be unique compared to other types of content.
At the same time, follow Google video best practices and its image advice. You’ll be fine.
4. Add who, how, and why.
Share who wrote the content, how it was generated, and why it was created.
5. Don’t create spam.
Google shares 20 practices it considers spammy. Avoid them.
AI and SEO Now: What’s Changed
Two important changes have impacted SMBs.
The Bad and the Ugly
Google’s AI Overviews
Google’s AI Overview feature is the main change affecting your website metrics.
For most small and midsize businesses (SMBs), Google’s AI Overviews took hold in the late summer of 2025.
Because of that change, you likely have significantly fewer clicks and fewer impressions.
That’s because top-of-the-funnel commodity content that simply answers questions is being viewed directly in the AI Overviews. These potential customers are finding their answers in the AI Overview and never leave Chrome or their other Google-powered search engine.
Even if your website is listed as the AI source, only about 1% (!) of these people will click the link to visit your website page.
What does this mean? This is why you want your content to express a unique viewpoint and bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) content. Make your website worth visiting.
Chatbots
Similarly, but to a much lesser extent, chatbots are gaining momentum. Potential customers are relying on ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, or other chatbots to answer their questions.
The Result
Chatbot users and “Googlers” who find their answers in the chatbot or Chrome are unlikely to visit your website.
Importantly, people are still going to websites to submit leads or make purchases.
The Good
Now that the AI Overview feature is present, you likely have a higher click-through rate (CTR) and an improved organic search position.
This means that visitors are still coming to your website, usually when they want to:
- Learn about your company
- Evaluate your business offering (bottom-of-the-funnel content)
- Experience a brand to which they are loyal
- Submit a lead or make a purchase
What’s Emerging
For ecommerce sites, shoppers may never visit your website.
Instead, they will purchase your products on Chrome or through AI agents.
This will allow extreme personalization.
For example, it will return exact recommendations for highly specific queries such as “recommend a pickleball shoe for a 24-year-old weekend warrior with a wide foot who loves pink” or “what are some milk-free healthy snacks I can give my toddler when traveling in the car?”
To that end, Google is recommending Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) specifications, because UCP understands:
- Discovery (search)
- Inventory
- Cart management
- Checkout
In fact, UCP is being called the “HTML” of ecommerce.
In this way, agents (from all AI sources) can communicate with the back end of your website in one unified way. Importantly, you do NOT need to remove your current ecommerce technology.
However, you do need to ensure it communicates effectively with AI agents.
For example, you’ll want to ensure that your Merchant Center account is fully configured, including your:
- Product feed
- Shipping settings
- Return policies
- Customer support information
Once the site’s UCP is ready, you will need to join Google’s approval waitlist.
What’s an SMB Owner to Do? 10 Action Items
First, understand that SEO and websites are not “dead.”
Here are 10 action items you can take:
- Stay calm. AI Overviews have shifted search results. But the AI “sky” is not falling. It is evolving — albeit VERY quickly.
- Buyer beware! Don’t automatically trust “Foxy Loxy.” If it sounds like it’s too good to be true, it probably is. Test what a salesperson is telling you and compare their “insights” across multiple agencies.
- Google the answer.
- Ask a chatbot. Again, beware! Chatbots, although improving, can hallucinate.
- Go to the source and ensure it’s not simply from a company that has “skin” in the game. Seek out an objective source.
- Find a trustworthy agency. It will NOT promise you the sun, the moon, and the stars. It will not use fear tactics. It will NOT seek to replace a well-optimized HTML website.
- Ensure your website pages can be crawled and parsed. An SEO or developer can help you know what Google crawls and how pages render. Or paste your code in a chatbot and ask it what it understands.
- Follow Google’s optimization guidelines, which are nearly identical to the SEO guidelines it and we have cited for years
- Paste your blog content into Gemini and ask whether it’s commodity content or unique.
- If you have an ecommerce site, learn about and implement the Universal Commerce Protocol. You’ll want to ensure that your products can be purchased easily and directly in Google Shop, Gemini, chatbots, AI agents, Google Ads, and other platforms.
Buyer Beware! Don’t automatically trust “Foxy Loxy.”
Source:
This content was written by an imperfect but trustworthy human based on real experiences. We wrote it to address trends we are seeing in the marketing industry. We then asked Gemini for a fact check and a commodity check. We tweaked a few typos, and Gemini approved our content. We then asked Gemini to generate our images.
Nancy Burgess
