What actually works in AI search in 2026 and what’s expensive hype.
ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI answers are changing how customers find businesses like yours. Most advice about it is guesswork, and some of it is simply made up. This free report sets out what the published data actually shows: what is worth doing, what is not, and how to tell the difference.
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Read it in an afternoon. Save yourself from paying for things that do not work.
How AI search actually works now
There is not one “AI search.” There are four surfaces your customers now use, each built differently, each citing a mostly different set of pages.
Google AI Overviews
The AI summary box that now sits above the blue links, built from Google’s normal index. It hits your traffic hardest because it answers the question before anyone scrolls.
Google AI Mode
The chat-style version of Google. Made the default search experience worldwide in May 2026 — impressive on paper, but still a small slice of real behavior.
ChatGPT
The standalone assistant most people mean by “AI.” The giant of AI referrals, leaning heavily on Bing’s index and weighting your opening paragraphs.
Perplexity
A smaller answer engine with its own index and a loyal, high-intent audience. Worth staying visible in — it costs nothing — but not worth a big budget line.
One thing every surface shares: it can only recommend a page it can find, fetch, and read. That is where the real work is — and it is cheaper than what you are being sold.
Ten findings from the report
Each of these comes from a named, published study. The report gives the full context behind every one.
That is ten. The report has the rest, with the studies behind each one.
Proven vs. hype, side by side
What the evidence supports, and what is marketed hard but does not hold up. Every tactic in the full report carries an evidence grade — here is a taste of each column.
Evidence supports it — do this
Marketed hard — the evidence says no
That is 10 rows. The full verdict tables — 40-plus graded tactics, plus the fabricated stats dissected as step-by-step detective stories — are in the report.
Three things you can do this week — free
Most of what is sold as “AI SEO” is slow, expensive, or unproven. These are not. Each is cheap, backed by real data, and doable by you or your web person in an afternoon.
Let the right AI crawlers through
Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and confirm you have not accidentally blocked the bots that feed AI answers: Googlebot, GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, Applebot. You cannot be cited if you cannot be fetched.
Put the answer first
Rewrite each important page so the first sentence under every heading is a complete, standalone answer — not “as mentioned above, it varies.” 44.2% of AI citations come from the first third of a page, and it reads better for humans too.
Effort: 2–4 hours, freeComplete your Google Business Profile and gather reviews
If you serve a local or regional market, fill out every GBP field and build a steady flow of real reviews. It is the closest thing to a sure bet in the whole report — Gemini pulls straight from Google Maps — and one study found brands with no active review profile were cited about 1% of the time versus 75% for those with a managed profile.
Effort: 1–2 hours, then ongoingFive more quick wins — plus a “skip these this week” list of what not to waste money on — are in the report’s checklist.
How this report was researched
Here is how the report was put together, and what was cut along the way.
Five contested questions, where credible sources genuinely disagreed, were resolved with dedicated follow-up research rather than a convenient pick. Where sources still disagree, we say so — which is why several chapters give you a range instead of one tidy number.
Where the evidence is thin, the report says so instead of rounding up. Every chapter ends with its full source list, so you can check any number yourself.
What’s inside
Written in plain English. Every chapter ends with its sources.
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Who wrote this
WilkiLeads is a one-person web-design and SEO consultancy run by Eric Wilkinson, building and improving websites for small businesses across several countries and helping them get found — in ordinary search and, increasingly, in the AI answers this report is about. You deal with Eric directly, with the same skepticism you have just read: he would rather tell you a tactic is not proven than sell you a package around it.
If the report is useful and you want the next step, the most direct one is the Complete SEO Action Plan — a fixed-price €99 audit that turns these fundamentals into a specific, prioritized to-do list for your site: what is blocking you, what to fix first, what to ignore. No retainer, no lock-in, no guaranteed-ranking promises — you will know why those are not real.
See the €99 Complete SEO Action Plan → Or book a free call →Get the honest version of AI search in 2026.
The full 65-page report is free. Read it before you spend money on “AI SEO”.
Prefer to talk it through? Book a free 30-min call →
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