Every client conversation asks: “will that increase ranking”, “whats the SEO ranking” , the monthly analytics document questions come flying in; SEO creates a seesaw or the butterfly effect in clients eyes
We’ve had this all year and arrived at the same place. Traffic is down, rankings look fine, and nobody can explain the gap. It’s the defining question in UK digital marketing right now, and the honest answer is that it’s not really a search problem at all. It’s a brand problem wearing a search problem’s clothes.
Thinking about it at Nonfacture, and what we’re changing in the work we do and really. what’s actually happening in the UK.
So around 62% of UK searches now end without a click to any website. That’s slightly below the US figure of roughly 68%, mostly because Google’s AI features rolled out here later, and the gap is closing. The distribution matters more than the headline. When an AI Overview appears, the zero-click rate rises to about 83%. Informational queries — the explainer content most content marketing is built on — run near 74% zero-click. Transactional and branded queries sit far lower, around 31%. Sistrix data reported in Press Gazette in May 2026 put the click-through drop at the top organic position at roughly 59% when an AI Overview is present.
So the loss is not spread evenly. Your “what is” blog post has lost most of its traffic. Your product page and your branded search have not. That asymmetry is the whole strategy.
The UK has a rule nobody else has and this is the part most search coverage written for an American audience simply doesn’t contain.
In October 2025 the CMA designated Google as having Strategic Market Status in general search. On 3 June 2026 it imposed the first Publisher Conduct Requirement under that designation — a world first. Google must give UK site owners a control determining whether their content can be used to power AI Overviews, AI Mode and AI features in Discover, with a separate control covering use for model fine-tuning. It must also attribute publisher content properly with clear links in AI-generated results, and report engagement metrics to publishers in a more usable form. The controls are due in Search Console within nine months of the decision, and opting out must not carry a ranking penalty.
British businesses are therefore about to face a decision no other market has to make: whether to let their content feed the answer at all.
We’d urge clients not to treat this as a technical toggle. If most of your sector stays in and you opt out, you disappear from the summary while your competitors are named in it. If your content is genuinely proprietary, original research, real pricing, methodology you’d rather not see paraphrased, the calculation changes. Either way it’s a positioning decision about where your brand wants to be visible, and it should be made at board level with a view of what competitors are doing, not quietly by whoever holds the Search Console login.
Why we call it a branding problem
Two points really reframed this for us all.
First, ranking and citation have come apart. Only around 38% of pages cited in AI Overviews now rank in Google’s top ten, down from roughly 76% in mid-2025. You can hold position one and be entirely absent from the answer above it.
Second, being named beats ranking. Seer Interactive’s analysis of over five million tracked queries found brands cited inside an AI Overview earn more clicks per impression than brands sitting at position one beneath it. And branded searches that trigger an AI Overview actually see click-through rise — the summary confirms you exist and are legitimate, and the user clicks to act.
Put those together and the objective changes. It is no longer “rank for the term.” It is “be the brand the system is confident enough to name.” Confidence is built from consistency, specificity and verifiability — which is brand strategy, not keyword research.
What we’re changing in the work
Entity consistency is now brand consistency. Your description on your own site, your Google Business Profile, Companies House, LinkedIn, trade directories and review platforms are read as one entity. A brand described four different ways across those sources is a brand a retrieval system can’t confidently summarise. We now treat the boilerplate description as a deliverable in its own right — one paragraph, agreed, deployed everywhere.
Verbal identity has to survive summarisation. Generic descriptive copy gets dissolved into a paragraph with no attribution. Named, distinctive things get carried through. A proprietary process with an actual name, a product range with a coherent naming system, a strapline with structure to it — these are the elements that come out the other side of a summary still attached to you.
Get your names legally right. A very British point: UK reserved description rules govern what you can call a product, particularly in food and drink. We repeatedly brought this up with large juice beverage client range this year. It matters more now than it did, because an inaccurate or non-compliant product name doesn’t just sit on your packaging- it gets repeated, at scale, by systems that won’t check it for you.
Schema is brand infrastructure. Organisation, Product, Service and FAQ markup, planned at sitemap level rather than bolted on. We now annotate schema directly onto site architecture during the design phase, so the structure and the identity are designed together.
Visual and product assets count. Descriptive, contextual product photography, short explainer video, complete location data. Businesses with genuine visual assets have citation material that text-only competitors don’t — and most UK SMEs are sitting on it unused.
Local stays clickable. “Near me” style queries trigger AI Overviews far less often. For service businesses across the West Midlands, let’s say and beyond, classic local discipline still delivers real traffic.
Don’t abandon what’s working to chase what’s changing.
Measure it differently
Google completed the worldwide rollout of its Generative AI performance report in Search Console on 31 August 2026, showing impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode by page, country, date and device. It’s free, and most clients we speak to haven’t opened it.
Beyond that, build a fixed panel of prompts covering your audiences and buying stages, and check them on a set cadence — logging date, device, whether you were mentioned and which URL was cited. It’s manual work, thats honest answer.
The businesses coming through this well aren’t the ones publishing the most. They’re the ones that are specific, consistently described, and distinctive enough to be worth naming. That’s what a brand is for. It just happens that the audience now includes machines.
If you’d like a view on how your brand is currently being described in AI answers — and what to do about the CMA opt-out before the control appears — we’re happy to take a look.
