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Search engines increasingly give an answer themselves, instead of only a list of links. What is fact, what is assumption, and what do you do with it? Below is where things stand in November 2026, with sources.
What has changed in Google?
For some searches, Google shows an AI Overview: a short summary with links to websites where you can read more. It is available in the Netherlands, in Dutch (Google Search Help ⇲). The overview only appears when Google considers it useful, so not for every search.
In October 2025, AI Mode came to the Netherlands: a separate tab where you ask complex questions and follow-up questions and get a fuller answer with source links (NL Times ⇲). To do this, Google runs several related searches at once. As a result, a broader and more varied set of websites can appear as sources (Google Search Central ⇲).
What does that mean for your visitors?
In March 2025, Pew Research tracked the browsing behaviour of 900 US adults. When an AI summary appeared in the search results, people clicked a regular search result in 8 per cent of visits. Without a summary, it was 15 per cent. A click on a link inside the summary itself happened in 1 per cent of visits to search pages with a summary (Pew Research Center ⇲).
Note: this is a US measurement from a single month, not a Dutch figure. It does show why you should not steer only by visitor numbers.
What does Google itself say?
According to Google, there are no extra requirements for the AI features in Search. Your page must be indexed and eligible to be shown with a snippet. No special markup or separate file is needed (Google Search Central ⇲). The May 2025 recommendations are familiar advice:
- Create unique, useful content for people.
- Provide a good page experience: fast and easy to read on every device.
- Make sure Google can reach and index your pages.
- Make sure structured data matches what is visible on the page.
- Use snippet settings such as nosnippet and max-snippet deliberately. Stricter settings also limit how your content appears in AI features.
- Measure what visits deliver, such as sales or sign-ups, and not only clicks.
Source: Google Search Central Blog ⇲.
Can you use AI to create content?
Yes, but Google looks at quality, not at how something was made. AI gives your content no advantage, but using it is not an offence in itself (Google Search Central, February 2023 ⇲).
It goes wrong when you generate many pages to influence rankings. Google's spam policies call this "scaled content abuse", including when you use generative AI for it (Google Search Central: spam policies ⇲). Such pages can rank lower or disappear from the results.
What is GEO?
GEO stands for generative engine optimisation: setting up your content so that AI answer engines use and cite you as a source. The term comes from a 2023 research paper by Aggarwal and colleagues, later presented at the KDD conference in 2024 (arXiv ⇲).
The researchers tested methods such as citing sources, using expert quotations and adding statistics. In their tests, the visibility of a source rose by up to 40 per cent, and on Perplexity by up to 37 per cent. The effect varied by subject.
Two caveats. It is research, not a guarantee. And Google says you do not need to do anything special for its own AI features. In practice, GEO therefore comes down to the same basics: clear answers with verifiable figures and sources.
What do you do with this now?
- Write answers to your customers' real questions, with your own experience and examples that only you have.
- Use AI as a writing aid, not to fill pages in bulk. Have a person check the result and add something of your own.
- Check in Search Console that Google indexes your pages and that you are not using nosnippet by accident.
- Measure enquiries, conversations and sales, not just visitors. Traffic from AI features is included in the standard performance report in Search Console.
- Give your source for figures, so readers can check them.
Want to know what this means for your website, or how to use AI safely in your content? Get in touch with us by email or directly via WhatsApp ⇲.