Edition 29: Google Answers First Now

On July 10, Google finished rolling out a change it previewed at its developer conference in May. Search now leads with an answer written by Gemini, Google's AI, on close to every query. It used to be something you opted into. Now it's simply how the results page works. Liz Reid, Google's VP of Search, described it as the biggest change to the search box in more than 25 years.

Before you react to any of the coverage, one correction is worth making. The ordinary list of links is still there. Google has confirmed that. It sits underneath the AI answer rather than at the top of the page, which is a meaningfully different situation from the headlines announcing the end of blue links.

The part that matters for your business is what it does to the people who reach you. Someone looking for your service now reads a summary of what you do before they decide whether to click anything. By the time they land on your site, they have already been told the basics by something that isn't you.

That quietly changes the job your homepage has to do. Picture someone being walked across a room and introduced to you before either of you has spoken. You wouldn't open by giving your name. For years your first screen had to establish what you do and why anyone should care, and now most visitors arrive with that part handled. What they want is the layer underneath: what it costs, whether you cover their area, how quickly you can get out to them. If your opening screen is still introducing you, it's answering a question they stopped asking.

None of this changes the underlying work, which is worth saying plainly because plenty of people will try to sell you something this month. Pages that are clear, written for people rather than for a search engine, that answer the questions customers really ask, and that load quickly on a phone. That's the same list we would have given you last year, and it matters more now than it did then.

Yes, and the reasoning is more straightforward than it might look.

The AI answer isn't inventing anything. It reads pages that are already published and summarizes them, which means it has to decide which pages are worth reading in the first place. It makes that decision using largely the same signals that decided rankings before. That's why the pages ranking well in ordinary search tend to be the ones getting quoted in AI answers, and why falling out of one usually means falling out of both.

What changes is what you're aiming at. Rather than occupying a spot on a list, you're trying to be the page the answer gets built from, and then give the people who do click something worth their time. The work behind that hasn't changed much: clear service pages, honest answers to the questions customers really ask, and a site that behaves properly on a phone.

One thing to watch for. You'll see "AI search packages" sold hard this year. Google's own position is that there's no separate AI strategy, just the same fundamentals applied to a new surface, and on that point we'd agree with them. If someone is selling you a separate product for it, ask them exactly what they would do differently.

This week we're going through managed sites reading the AI answer for each client's main services, then checking whether the client's own page answers more than that summary already does. Where it doesn't, the first screen is what we'll be rewriting.

We're also watching the ranking movement that started around July 11 in case Google confirms something, and finishing WordPress patching on the sites we manage. If any of it needs a decision from you, we'll come to you directly. Reporting stays in your Client Center.