Red Isle WebTry this the next time you have your phone out. Search "best heat pump installer PEI" and look at what comes back. Before any list of businesses, Google now writes you an answer, a few paragraphs naming who it thinks fits, put together by an AI that read a pile of websites in the time it took the page to load.
The first time I watched it name specific Island businesses, what struck me wasn't the technology. It was that only some businesses were in the running to be named at all, and plenty of good ones weren't anywhere in it.
AI Overviews are the AI-written answer Google now drops at the very top of a lot of searches, above the usual list of links. For a small business the practical effect is that fewer people scroll down to the links at all, so the game has shifted from ranking in that list to getting your business named inside the AI answer itself. And that happens when your website is clear and easy for the AI to read.
What is an AI Overview?
You've probably seen one without knowing the name. You search a question and, before any of the blue links, Google shows a few paragraphs of answer it wrote for you by reading a bunch of websites. That's an AI Overview. Ask an assistant like ChatGPT for "a good electrician in Charlottetown" and you get the same kind of thing, a straight answer instead of a page to scroll through.
These answers now show up on a large and growing share of searches. The habit is forming fast. People read the answer and stop, without ever clicking through to a website.
What they change for you
When the answer sits at the top, a lot of people never reach the list of links underneath, which is where businesses used to compete. So being tenth, or fifth, or even near the top of the old list matters less than it did, because fewer eyes get down there.
The new prize is being one of the businesses the AI mentions in its answer. If someone asks their phone for a recommendation in your line of work and your name is what it hands back, that's about the best free advertising there is. If it names someone else, the customer never even sees a list to scroll past. They just get a name, and you want it to be yours.
How do you get mentioned in the AI answer?
The AI can only recommend a business it can find and understand, and it builds its answer by reading websites. So the way in is a clean, clear site it can read without tripping. Say plainly what you do and where you do it. Keep your hours, services, and contact details current and consistent everywhere they appear. Answer the questions customers actually ask, in simple words, on your site. Have reviews it can see. None of that is exotic, it's the same clarity that helped with regular search, just now it decides whether a machine is willing to put your name forward.
If you don't have a website at all, or yours is thin and out of date, the AI has nothing to go on, and it moves along to a competitor it can read.
What gets you mentioned
You don't need to chase every new AI feature or understand how any of it works under the hood. The thing that gets you mentioned is the same thing that's always helped, a clear, current, easy-to-read website, it just matters more now. Get that right and you're ready for this shift instead of scrambling to catch up to it.
Setting Island businesses up that way is what I do, for $1,000, with no monthly fee attached. If you're wondering whether an AI would ever recommend your business as it stands, send me a note and I'll take a look at what an AI sees when it reads your site.