Discover how to get your Ipswich business discovered in the AI overviews

If you’re an SME in Suffolk, you’re probably worried about how much you’ll have to spend to get seen on these AI overviews. Your budget is tight and you don’t have any spare cash to waste.

You need to know that whatever you invest in will provide you with significant, long-term gains.

So let’s cut through the noise and be clear about two things.

1. You don’t need to spend £££££ on generative engine optimisation. It’s the same as SEO, just packaged under a different name. Instead, focus on the fundamental best-practice standards (which we’ll come to) and you’ll be in a good position when the hype dies down.
2. SEO is not dead. We have to keep repeating this because the noise is deafening. But earlier this year, data from Ahrefs confirmed that while 63% of sites receive AI traffic, only 17% of the average website’s traffic comes from AI chatbots.

Back in August, Google itself said

What this means is that the discovery landscape is maturing.

In the same article, Google point out that.

This confirms to us something we’ve felt for a long time.

You still need technical SEO and effective website development. But, to complement that, you also need to invest in high-quality content and focus on getting your brand visible across a range of platforms, which will provide additional signals for AI systems to learn from.

We don’t want to get too technical in this article, but we do want to make it clear to you that AI overviews don’t “decide” like a person.

Those tools will summarise and rank evidence.

Each system will have its own way of sourcing data, but you can expect them to pull information from

• Your website and structured data.
• Third-party mentions: news, trade media, local press and blogs.
• Social signals and community conversations.
• Public business profiles, reviews and aggregated data.

What matters to AI is breadth (how many places mention you), recency (how current those mentions are) and clarity (how consistently you present your business details and services).

If your Ipswich is continually ticking all those boxes, then AI tools are more likely to include you in overviews and recommendations.

Simply put, it’s about continuing to focus on best practice standards.

If you’re not sure what this means in practice, then keep reading because it’s about to become very clear.

It makes sense to start from the very beginning, doesn’t it?

Why does your website development matter so much? It’s because your web development is the fundamental building block for the signals that search engines and AI tools can crawl. Prioritising usability and accessibility and ensuring that every page is indexed on search engines means that the learning bots can crawl your site, understand it, and pass that information on to their users.

If your site is slow, blocked or full of duplicate content, earned media and schema won’t help.

This doesn’t mean immediately investing in a new website.

But it does mean that you should focus on the short-term wins.

• Do you have a mobile-first UX? You need to ensure you have a responsive design, readable fonts, clear navigation and fast touch responses. It’s always worth checking forms and CTA placement on smaller screens.
• Do you have the accessibility basics in place? Too many websites are inaccessible to people with disabilities or neurodiversity. It’s time to make sure that you are providing semantic headings, descriptive alt text, checking for keyboard navigability and meaningful link text. If you’re using third-party plugins, make sure you check them against assistive technologies. Accessibility improves human UX and also helps machines analyse structure.
• Have you checked your crawlability and indexability? Make sure that your Robots.txt and sitemap.xml are correct and submitted to Search Console.
• Are you displaying a clear NAP everywhere you are listed online? Consistency of name, address, phone number everywhere you are listed (your site, social media, Google profile, Bing profile) is important so that the same information is being crawled with no continuity errors.

When you have all of these fundamental basics in place, you’re showing Google and the AI tools that you have done everything that they recommend. So, if and when Google decides to roll out another core update, your traffic visibility should remain stable because you’ve adhered to their clear guidelines.

Have you been told you should stop with SEO and focus on GEO instead to get featured in AI overviews?

It’s a really dirty trick that some SEOs are playing, because they are ultimately the same thing.

AI and generative features increasingly rely on structured signals and clear entity data. When you have the basics in place, you’ll have everything there that will help AI tools associate facts with your brand.

We recommend prioritising the following.

• Meta hygiene and on-page basics. This means having unique titles and meta descriptions for each page, including local modifiers where relevant (e.g., “Ipswich web design agency — ecommerce specialists”).
• Do your H1 title tags match page intent? Make the most of subheadings (H2/H3) that break content into scannable blocks.
• Are you writing useful meta descriptions that encourage clicks on Middle-of-the-funnel and bottom-of-the-funnel pages?
• Avoid canonicalisation and duplicated content. Of course, you don’t want to be trying to compete against yourself in the search engines, but you also don’t want to confuse the AI algorithm when it’s crawling your site. Consolidate thin pages and parameterised URLs; prefer a single authoritative version of each service page.
• Check your Local Business schema. You want to make sure that your NAP, geo coordinates, opening hours and logo are consistent everywhere they are used to avoid confusing the AI tools.
• Make the most of the FAQ schema for common questions you want in featured snippets. The more you can show that you are answering customer questions and pre-empting what they need to know, the more you are educating the AI tools. This is where it’s beneficial to use clear question/answer headings in your content.

As we always say, none of this is recreating the wheel. Instead, it’s focusing on those fundamental basics that you should have been doing for years.

Now your site is ready and raring to go, it’s time to examine how the content you publish on your site, and the brand mentions you achieve elsewhere, can contribute towards your AI visibility.

We’re noticing that the real ‘aha’ moment for businesses in Ipswich is our explanation that great quality content, a drip feed of backlinks, social listening and digital PR activity is the key to getting discovered on AI overviews.

It makes sense because earned media and frequent, topical content will create those multiple, recent references that AI is looking for to learn about your business.

The AI robots will have far more sources of information to learn from than just your website. As you provide a consistent, drip-feed approach to content marketing and PR activity, you’ll also benefit from a very welcome side effect. A better reputation and increased brand loyalty amongst your customers.

So what does this look like in practice?

• Focusing on owned content that prioritises your customers, not algorithms. Great published content on your website is the blogs, landing pages, eBooks, webinars, case studies and articles that genuinely solve customer problems. You should be writing about the thing that customers are searching for, and explaining who you are, what you do, and why they should choose you.

All of this information will be used by AI tools to drive the informational intent searches, or the top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) information. Then, when a customer chooses to click through to your website, they will be far more likely to convert into a paying customer.

• Proactive PR is about building relationships. When you engage in proactive press activity, you’re building relationships with journalists in the hope they will write about you and provide you with earned media coverage. AI tools and overviews love to scour news sites and media outlets. If you’re regularly featured in these pages, talking about your services, company news, community initiatives and sponsorships, anniversaries, workplace culture, award recognition and thought leadership, then you are actively feeding the AI tools far more information about who you are and what you do.
• Reactive commentary is just as relevant. A core part of building those positive PR relationships and improving brand awareness (and gaining those all-important backlinks) is to provide answers to any comments that journalists might be looking for. Tools such as Response Source, Press Plugs, HARO and the #journorequest hashtag are all good ways of searching for media opportunities. This gives you the opportunity to have expert quotes published on a number of external websites, positioning you as the authoritative voice on many different subjects. You’ll be surprised by how many opportunities there are to speak ‘around’ your subject base, rather than just prioritising sales messages.

This is beneficial for AI discovery because it means there are far more places for AI tools to learn about who you are. You’re actively feeding them with far more positive information, which will also be noted by potential customers.

The more visible you are, the more it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because as you grow and expand your reputation, your customers will start becoming your advocates. They’ll start discussing you on community forums, and on social media, and social listening tools will be able to track that changing brand sentiment.

Investing in external PR and content gives you two massive opportunities under one umbrella. These repeated mentions will protect you from being squeezed out of the AI overviews by your competitors.

Now you know what to do to get featured in AI overviews and recommended by AI tools, it’s time to put all of these little details into practice.

You might be panicking about how much work is involved, or how much technical knowledge you need to succeed.

The good news is that it’s a lot simpler than you think, which actually makes it more affordable than you might realise.

You don’t need to hire three different teams to get the work done to a high standard. Nor do you need to spend hours trying to figure it out yourself when you could spend that time focusing on other pressing priorities.

As an Ipswich web design agency, we build these best practice standards into everything that we do by default. We have consistently prioritised best practice standards in design, development, SEO and content for years.

That is how we know that this approach works.

The technologies and search mechanisms may have changed, but the fundamentals of good practice still remain. We don’t focus on the quick, superficial wins. We prioritise the long-term benefits that are proven to grow your business.

Why not book a call with our team to see how we can help you get discovered in the AI overviews?