Are Your Customers Deciding Before They Reach Your Website?

At the end of last year, we put Search Everywhere Optimization near the top of the trends we were watching for 2026 — the move from ranking on Google’s ten blue links to being legible across Maps, Bing, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and the AI summaries now sitting on top of search. Half a year on, it has stopped being something to watch and has become the environment everyone is working in. So let’s get practical: what is actually happening, and what to do about it.

The data is solid, if less dramatic than the headlines. SparkToro’s 2024 clickstream study, run with Datos, found that 58.5% of U.S. Google searches ended without a click to any website, with roughly 360 of every 1,000 reaching the open web. Read it closely: about a fifth of those sessions were people refining a search, not getting a final answer, and the count includes clicks to Google’s own properties. This is not the website’s death. But where Google shows an AI Overview, click-through falls off a cliff, and that is the direction of travel in 2024.

Google made the point literal in 2024, too, when it switched off the free websites it had let businesses build through Business Profiles. Those pages stopped working in March and stopped redirecting on June 10; after that, visitors hit a dead link. Thin, unmanaged presence was no longer worth hosting. So the work now is to build a real presence that holds up wherever a customer — or a machine — encounters it.

Everything standing between a customer and your site does the same thing: it retrieves business information, summarizes it, and recommends. Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode pull from the same index as ordinary search, and Google states plainly that there is no separate AI ranking system and no special file or markup to add for it. Its Gemini-powered Ask Maps feature lets people ask a full question — “somewhere quiet for coffee that’s open now” — and get an answer with a short list, treating reviews and photos as evidence.

Apple now needs equal attention as a separate system. Apple Business, called Apple Business Connect until early 2026, lets any business control how it appears across Maps, Siri, Wallet, and Messages to more than a billion users. Microsoft rebuilt Bing Places in October 2025 at bing.com/forbusiness, with a faster import from your Google profile; that data feeds Bing and Copilot, and Bing pulls its reviews from Yelp and other third parties rather than collecting its own. Together, these systems show why your presence must remain aligned beyond Google.

Don’t panic, but don’t stand still either. The businesses pulling ahead are doing unglamorous, specific work. Four things matter most:

Every other surface checks itself against your website, so the facts there have to be correct, up to date, and machine-readable. Put your name, address, phone, service area, hours, and core services in plain text, not locked inside an image or a graphic. Add structured data — the standardized tags Google uses to identify a business and tell it apart from others — and make sure it matches what a visitor actually sees. This is the unglamorous side of the entity clarity we wrote about in January: a business, a machine, can name, place, and trust. Don’t oversell the markup, though. Google is clear that the fundamentals that always mattered still do, and that no special “AI schema” exists. Yet.

Claim your profile on Google Business Profile, Apple Business, and Bing Places (Bing can import most of it from Google in a few minutes). Then make the core details identical across all three: the same business name, address format, phone, hours, and primary category. Use real photographs of your premises, your staff, and your work, not stock images. That consistency matters because a half-filled or inconsistent profile is the one an AI answer skips or gets wrong.

Beyond those three, your business shows up across dozens of directories — Yelp, Facebook, Apple Maps, plus industry and local listings — and the platforms cross-reference them to judge whether your information can be trusted. Editing hundreds of sites by hand is not the answer. A small set of data aggregators — Data Axle, Neustar Localeze, and Foursquare — supply business data to most of the directories, maps, and voice assistants downstream, so correcting your details there spreads widely (allow a month or two to propagate). Localeze, in particular, feeds many voice and navigation results, including to Siri. Keep the name, address, and phone number identical everywhere; mismatched records confuse both people and the systems that read them. Audit periodically with a tool such as BrightLocal, Whitespark, or Moz Local, because duplicates reappear after a move or a number change. This is the same clean, machine-readable data that agentic shopping tools will lean on as they start shortlisting vendors with no human in the loop.

Reviews are now one of the strongest signals these systems use, and Google has been tightening the rules around them fast. In April 2026, it banned asking customers to name a specific staff member, asking for a particular star rating, and setting review quotas for employees — all common practices in home services, auto, and medical offices. Enforcement is automated; by Google’s own count, it removed more than 292 million policy-violating reviews in 2025. Reviews where a customer names someone themselves are still fine. What you cannot do is script them. So ask every customer, in neutral language, once the visit is over — not on a tablet at the counter, and never in exchange for a discount. The most useful reviews describe the specific problem you solved (“they repaired our old panel instead of selling us a new one”) rather than “great service,” but you earn those by doing the work and asking honestly, not by telling people what to write. (We went deeper on this in five surprising truths about online reviews.)

Google’s review change is one instance of a larger pattern: the platforms keep shifting the goalposts, and sometimes contradict themselves. For years, marketers added FAQ markup to ordinary pages to claim a little more room in Google’s results. Google opened that feature to everyone in 2019, narrowed it to government and health sites in 2023, and unceremoniously retired it for everyone in May 2026.  A tactic that worked for years is now simply gone.

llms.txt is messier still. It is a proposed file meant to hand AI systems a map of your best content, and Google’s Search team has spent over a year telling people to skip it. Then, in May 2026, Google’s own Chrome team started checking for the file in its Lighthouse audit tool, as a signal for AI browser agents. Same company, opposite signals, weeks apart. This is why we recommend waiting before building around every new signal as it appears.

Here’s what remains true and what we’ve always advocated: Invest in the part you control: keep accurate, consistent facts about your business in your own words, everywhere they show up. Audit them regularly and update them when they change. That holds no matter which way a given platform jumps next quarter.

We opened that same 2026 list with agentic AI, and the numbers around it cut both ways. Gartner expects at least 15% of day-to-day work decisions to be made autonomously by AI by 2028 — and, in the same report, that more than 40% of corporate agentic-AI projects will be canceled by 2027. Both are likely true. So the slower, surer bet pays off in either case: keep your information clean and consistent enough to be trusted, whether a person or a machine reads it first.

If you want help getting your business to show up cleanly across search, maps, and AI answers in or around Annapolis, talk to us.