This is the question I get asked more than any other at the moment, usually with a slightly worried look. Someone has read a headline about AI killing Google, or they have typed their own service into Google and seen a big AI-written answer sitting above everything else, and they want to know whether their website is about to become pointless.
So let me give you a straight answer, then explain the thinking behind it, because the honest version is more useful than either the doom or the hype.
No, AI search is not going to kill your website. But it is changing which visits you get, and if your site was already thin or built to catch people who were only ever after a quick fact, you will feel it. If your site earns enquiries from people ready to buy, you will barely notice.
What has actually changed
If you have not seen it yet, here is what people mean. Search something in Google now and you will often get an AI Overview: a paragraph or two the machine has written by pulling together bits from various websites, sitting right at the top before the normal results. Ask the same thing in ChatGPT or Google's Gemini and you get a similar answer, no list of blue links at all.
For certain searches, that answer is all the person needed. "How long does grout take to dry", "what temperature to set a combi boiler", "is it legal to park across my own driveway". They read the summary, they are satisfied, they never click through to anyone. The website that used to catch that visit still exists, but the visit no longer happens.
That is the real shift, and it is worth being clear-eyed about it. Some traffic is genuinely evaporating. The trade press has a phrase for it, the "zero-click search", where the whole thing begins and ends on the results page.
Why most local businesses are less exposed than they fear
Here is the part that gets lost in the panic. The searches AI answers well are the informational ones, the quick facts and how-tos. The searches that make you money are a different animal.
Think about the difference between "how much does a new boiler cost" and "boiler installation Gloucester". The first is someone doing homework. An AI Overview handles it nicely and might cost you a visit you were probably never going to convert anyway. The second is someone with a broken boiler and a postcode, and they are not looking for a paragraph of general guidance. They want a real company they can ring today.
AI is not good at that second job, and Google knows it. When there is clear local intent, you still get the map pack, the local listings and the ads. The machine is not going to tell someone "just use Dave's Plumbing, here's his number" because it cannot vouch for Dave. It hands that decision back to you, the searcher, which means the businesses that show up locally still get the click.
So if the bulk of your enquiries come from people searching with intent to hire, near where you work, your exposure is far smaller than a scary headline suggests. The traffic at risk is mostly the traffic that was never going to phone you.
The bit that should actually change how you work
None of that means sitting still. It means being deliberate about the kind of visit you are chasing.
For years, a lot of small business "content marketing" was built on catching informational searches and hoping some of those readers eventually turned into customers. Write forty blog posts answering common questions, rank for them, mop up the traffic. That model is the one under pressure, because the AI now answers a good share of those questions itself.
The work that holds up is the work aimed at people who are ready to act. That is your service pages, your location pages, your reviews, and a website that makes it easy and reassuring to get in touch. I have written before about why some sites get plenty of visitors but no enquiries, and that problem matters more now, not less. If AI trims away the casual browsers, the visitors you do get are more valuable, and losing them to a confusing or slow page is a worse mistake than it used to be.
There is also a quieter opportunity here. Those AI answers are built from real websites, and the tools do cite and link their sources. When your site is the one that clearly, plainly explains a topic, you can end up being the source the AI quotes, with your name attached. It is early days for measuring how much traffic that sends, but being the clear, trustworthy answer has never hurt.
What I would actually do about it
Practical steps, in the order I would tackle them.
Get your local presence right first. A complete, active Google Business Profile with genuine reviews is the single strongest signal that you are a real local business worth showing to a real local searcher. If you have not sorted this, start with getting found on Google Maps and collecting more reviews. This is the ground AI is least likely to take from you.
Make your website genuinely answer the questions a buyer has, in plain words. Not keyword-stuffed filler, but the things people actually want to know before they hire you: what you do, where you cover, roughly what it costs, how quickly you respond, why you rather than the next firm. Clear, honest, specific content is what earns trust from a human and what a search engine can confidently draw on. This is most of what good SEO has always been, and it holds up fine in an AI world.
Stop measuring success by raw visitor numbers alone. If your traffic dips a little because the tyre-kickers now get their answer from a summary, but your enquiries hold steady or rise, that is a healthier position, not a worse one. Watch the number that pays your wages, which is enquiries, not clicks.
And if you were relying on a website built years ago that loads slowly and buries your phone number, this is the nudge to fix it. When every visit counts for more, a website that is actually built to convert stops being a nice-to-have.
The short version
AI search is real and it is changing the shape of your traffic. It is taking the quick-answer visits, the ones that rarely turned into work anyway. It is not taking the person with a problem, a budget and a local postcode, and it is not making a clear, trustworthy, easy-to-contact website any less valuable. If anything it raises the bar, because the visitors you keep are the ones who matter.
If you are not sure how exposed your own site really is, or you have seen your traffic move and want to understand what is behind it, I am happy to take a proper look and tell you straight. Get in touch and we will go through it together.