For twenty years, the brief to a search agency was simple: get us to number one on Google. That brief is now out of date.
This isn’t another “AI is changing SEO” piece. The bigger shift is that discovery, recommendation, advertising and even the decision to buy are increasingly happening inside AI-driven search experiences, rather than in a list of ten blue links that sends someone to your website. Customer acquisition is moving with it, and the last few weeks have made that impossible to ignore.
Here are five developments from September 2026 alone, and what they mean for any business that relies on being found.
1. AI Overviews now sit between customers and your brand
Most businesses assumed branded search was safe. If someone typed your company name, they’d find you. Not any more.
Data from DemandSphere, reported by Search Engine Land, shows Google AI Overviews appeared on around 26% of tracked branded searches at the start of September. By the end of the month that figure was above 80%, peaking at over 90% on a single day. A separate test of 100 enterprise brands found AI Overviews on 93 of them.
In practice, that means a customer who searches for you by name may now read an AI-written summary of your business (your reviews, your pricing, what other sites say about you) before they ever reach your website. Nobody has yet measured the effect on clicks, but the question has changed. It’s no longer “do we rank for our own name?” It’s “what does AI say about us when someone searches our name?”
2. People are searching in conversations, not keywords
Search behaviour itself is changing. When Google rolled out AI Mode in 2025, Google Ads data analysed by Further showed short one- and two-word queries losing ground, while longer, more specific queries took a growing share of impressions and conversions.
People aren’t typing “accountant Bristol” so much as asking “what’s the best accountant for a small ecommerce business that sells on Amazon and needs help with VAT?” That’s a very different question. To answer it, AI tools pull together evidence from across the web: your website, your reviews, your case studies, forum discussions, press mentions and video. The brands that get recommended are the ones with the clearest, most consistent and most credible answers in all of those places, not just the ones with the best-optimised homepage.
3. ChatGPT has become a real advertising channel
A year ago, advertising inside ChatGPT was speculation. Now it’s a working channel. ChatGPT Ads went live in the UK in June, with self-serve access for UK advertisers following shortly after. On 16 September, OpenAI announced its biggest advertising update yet:
- Sponsored Agents, currently being tested with selected US advertisers, which let a user who clicks an ad start a clearly labelled conversation with a business’s own agent before visiting the website.
- AI-assisted campaign creation, where advertisers build and manage campaigns using plain-language prompts, with ad copy that adapts to the context of the conversation.
- HubSpot and Shopify integrations, connecting ChatGPT Ads directly to CRM and ecommerce platforms.
The scale is already significant. Research from Graphite and Similarweb puts ChatGPT Ads at a $1 billion annualised run rate, with 43% of ad-eligible US users having seen an ad within six months of launch. Click-through rates have doubled since launch.
The same research has a useful lesson. The best-performing advertisers write almost entirely new copy for ChatGPT, built around the problems people are actually discussing, rather than reusing their Google ads. The sensible approach is to treat it as a test-and-learn budget alongside Google, not instead of it. But businesses that start learning now will have a head start when it matures.
4. Google Ads is becoming an AI-run system
Paid search is changing just as quickly. On 23 September, Google announced new AI Max features, letting advertisers brief its AI in their own words about their business, audience and key messages, alongside new reporting that shows, in one view, the search term that triggered an ad, the creative that was shown and the landing page it sent people to.
The direction is clear. Google’s AI is taking more control of matching, messaging and landing pages. That makes two things more important than ever: the quality of what you feed the system (your website content, product data, conversion tracking and business context), and the discipline to check what the AI is actually doing with your budget. Handing the keys to automation without either is how ad spend quietly leaks away.
5. Google’s September spam update is a warning shot
Meanwhile, the traditional rankings are moving too. Google’s Search Status Dashboard confirms the September 2026 spam update began rolling out on 24 September and, at the time of writing, is still in progress.
It’s a timely reminder of the trap many businesses are walking into. Because AI makes content cheap, the temptation is to publish huge volumes of it: hundreds of near-identical location pages, thin AI-written blogs, pages made for search engines rather than people. Google’s spam policies specifically cover scaled content abuse, and every update brings ranking volatility for sites built that way.
The irony is that the content that holds up through spam updates is the same content AI tools like to cite: original, specific, expert and useful. Volume isn’t the strategy. Credibility is.
The real story: the end of Google-only search
Put these five developments together and the picture is clear. A typical customer journey in 2026 might look like this:
Google search → AI Overview → a follow-up question in ChatGPT → a YouTube review → TikTok or Instagram → Reddit and review sites → your website → a retargeting ad → conversion.
At almost every step, AI is deciding which brands get shown, summarised and recommended. Google is still the biggest single channel by a long way, but it’s no longer the only gatekeeper. This is what we call Search Everywhere Optimisation, and it changes the question every business should be asking its marketing team or agency.
The old question: “How do we rank number one on Google?”
The new question: “How do we make our brand discoverable, credible and recommendable everywhere our customers search and make decisions?”
What winning AI search actually takes
Answering that new question isn’t a single tactic. It brings together disciplines that most businesses still buy separately:
- Technical and content SEO: still the foundation, because AI tools draw heavily on the pages search engines can crawl and trust.
- AIO, AEO and GEO: structuring content so AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT and other assistants can understand it, quote it and recommend it.
- Structured data and entity authority: making it unambiguous who you are, what you do, where you operate and why you’re credible.
- Digital PR and third-party mentions: AI trusts what others say about you more than what you say about yourself.
- Reviews and reputation: increasingly the raw material AI uses to summarise and compare brands.
- Video and social search: YouTube, TikTok and Instagram are search engines in their own right, especially for younger audiences.
- Paid media across Google, Meta, YouTube and now ChatGPT: capturing demand wherever it appears, with AI-run campaigns properly briefed and properly checked.
- CRO and measurement: because visibility only matters if it turns into customers, and AI journeys are harder to track than a single click.
Run in isolation, each of these produces modest gains. Joined up, they produce something much more valuable: a brand that keeps turning up, with consistent and credible answers, wherever a customer looks.
Five questions to ask about your visibility this month
- When someone searches your brand name, what does the AI Overview say about you, and is it accurate?
- If a customer asks ChatGPT to recommend a business like yours, are you mentioned? Are your competitors?
- Does your content answer the long, specific questions your customers actually ask, or just target short keywords?
- Do you know exactly which search terms, ads and landing pages your Google Ads AI is using with your budget?
- Would your website hold up if Google’s next update targeted thin or mass-produced content?
If you’re unsure about two or more of those, you’re not alone. Most businesses are still measuring success by Google rankings while their customers have moved on to a much bigger search landscape.
How DNRG can help
DNRG works as an AI-first, outsourced marketing department, bringing SEO, AI search visibility, paid media, content, email and web development together under one strategy. Instead of asking how to rank you on Google, we start with a better question: where are your customers searching, and what does it take for your brand to be found, trusted and chosen there?
If you’d like to know how visible your business is across Google, AI Overviews and ChatGPT, and where the quickest wins are, get in touch with the DNRG team.
