A plain-English guide for founders, owners and marketing leads planning next year. Five shifts that will decide which businesses get found, chosen and remembered in 2027, with what to do about each, and guides for your sector.
At Google I/O in May 2026, Google said AI Overviews had passed 2.5 billion monthly users and AI Mode had passed 1 billion. OpenAI reported 900 million weekly ChatGPT users in February 2026. More of your buyers will form a shortlist before they visit any website.
What to do: list the questions buyers ask before choosing you and answer each one plainly on your own site. Then test what AI engines say about you every month.
In a 2025 Pew Research Center study of US Google users, people clicked a normal result 8% of the time when an AI summary appeared, against 15% when it did not. Less traffic will arrive from research searches, and the visitors who do arrive are closer to buying.
What to do: fix conversion before you buy more traffic. Clear offers, fast pages, simple forms and a follow-up that reaches every enquiry the same day.
AI engines and buyers both lean on what others say about you: press coverage, reviews, comparison articles and community threads. A brand that only talks about itself is easy to leave out.
What to do: treat PR and reviews as part of search. Plan coverage in the titles your buyers read and ask every happy customer for a detailed review.
Ad auctions get more competitive every year. Brands with real demand, people searching for them by name, convert paid traffic more cheaply than brands buying attention from scratch.
What to do: measure branded search as a headline number and judge paid media on cost per new customer, so you can see when demand building is paying off.
For high-ticket services, buyers contact several providers at once. The first to respond well usually wins the conversation. For DTC brands, the same is true of the first purchase and the second.
What to do: automate the first response, track every enquiry to a source and review the pipeline weekly. For ecommerce, build the flows that turn first orders into repeat ones.
Sources. Google, I/O keynote, May 2026: AI Overviews and AI Mode user figures. OpenAI, February 2026: ChatGPT weekly users. Pew Research Center, July 2025: clicks on searches with and without an AI summary.
Three stand out. Buyers increasingly get answers from AI before they visit a website, so being named in those answers matters as much as ranking. Paid media keeps getting more expensive, so brands need demand they don't pay for per click. And buyers check more sources before they decide, so reputation and follow-up speed decide more deals.
Yes. AI answers are built from pages search engines can find and trust, and most searches still run through the normal results page. In 2027 SEO and AI search are one job: rank the pages that matter and make them easy for AI engines to cite.
Start from what a customer is worth and what you can afford to pay for one, then split spend between channels that build demand, such as PR, SEO and content, and channels that capture it, such as paid search and paid social. Review it quarterly against cost per new customer, not return on ad spend alone.
Before the new year if you can. Most businesses decide their plans in December and January, so having tracking fixed and priorities agreed by then means the first quarter is spent growing, not setting up.
Yes. This page is reviewed and updated every year, so the advice reflects what is changing now, not what changed last year.
Yes. We work with UK and US businesses, and agree the plan after the audit.
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