Building a super-fast SEO friendly blog in NextJS
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Last week, Google announced the biggest change to Search in 25 years. The search bar, that white rectangle that has sat at the centre of the internet for a quarter of a century, is being replaced with an AI prompt interface. Instead of typing a few keywords and getting a list of links, users describe what they want, and Google’s AI builds a personalised answer. No links. No page one. Just a response.
My first reaction, honestly, was that this is good news for businesses that are serious about their online presence. Let me explain why.
When people hear “less website traffic,” they assume that means fewer customers. And yes, click-through rates are going to drop across the board. That part is true. But the traffic that does make it through to your website? It is going to be far more qualified than anything you were getting before.
Think about how people currently search. They type “solicitors Norwich,” scan five websites, and half of them were never going to hire anyone that day. They were browsing. With AI search, a person has to describe their actual situation to get a useful answer. “I need a solicitor in Norwich for a commercial lease dispute. How much does it typically cost?” By the time someone clicks through to your website from a response like that, they already know roughly what they want, and they have already filtered through a layer of options. The intent is higher. The likelihood of them picking up the phone is higher.
The businesses that will struggle are the ones waiting for this to settle down before they do anything about it.
Here is what a lot of people are getting wrong about AI search. They assume it is some completely different system that requires a completely different strategy. It is not. Google’s AI still pulls from the same web. It still crawls websites, reads content, evaluates authority, and decides who is trustworthy enough to cite. If your SEO fundamentals are shaky, AI search does not fix that. It makes it worse.
What has changed is where the AI is looking, and that is the bit most businesses are missing.
AI search does not just pull from Google results. It reads Reddit threads, YouTube videos, blog posts, business directories, news mentions, and social media. If your business only exists on your own website, the AI has a limited picture of who you are and what you do. If someone else in your industry has a YouTube channel, a presence on industry forums, and mentions scattered across the web, the AI has more to go on. More signals. More reason to cite them over you.
This is the shift that most businesses are not accounting for yet. It is not just about having a good website anymore. It is about having a visible, credible presence across the internet as a whole.
The way I think about it with clients is to ask: if someone described my business to Google’s AI without mentioning my name, would it point back to me? That is the test.
Get your Google Business Profile in order first.
If I could tell every business owner reading this to do one thing this week, it would be to go and sort out their Google Business Profile. Make it absolutely WHAM. Fill in every field. Upload photos, real ones, not stock images. Write a description that actually says what you do, who you help, and where you are. Include the words that your customers would use to describe what they need.
Google Business Profile has always mattered for local search. With AI search, it matters even more, because Google’s AI has direct access to that data and will use it when someone asks about businesses in your area.
Match your content to real intent.
This is where most business websites fall flat. They describe themselves in the language they use internally rather than the language their customers use when they have a problem. If you are a plumber in Norwich, “emergency boiler repair Norwich” is the intent you want to match, not “comprehensive heating solutions for residential properties.” The more your content mirrors how your customers actually think and speak, the more useful you are to the AI.
This applies to your social media, too. If you want to show up for local searches, you need to be using the local language consistently, not just on your website but across every platform you are active on.
Start creating content that shows lived experience.
Google’s own guidelines have shifted heavily toward what they call E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. The Experience part is new, and it is increasingly what separates good content from great content. The AI is looking for “I tried this, here is what happened” rather than “here is a general overview of this topic.”
A plumber who writes about the three most common boiler faults they fixed last winter in Norwich, with specific details about what went wrong and what fixed it, is going to outperform a generic article about boiler maintenance every single time. Real-world data, real-world experience. That is what feeds the AI well.
Get on YouTube.
This one sounds like a lot of effort, and I understand why people avoid it. But YouTube is owned by Google, and the AI reads transcripts. A video where you talk through how you approach a common problem in your industry, mentioning your location and your services naturally, is a powerful signal. It does not need to be polished. It needs to be genuinely useful.
The traffic drop has already started. AI Overviews, the summaries that appear above search results, have been rolling out for over a year now. Around half of all Google searches are already showing an AI-generated answer before any links appear. Many businesses have been watching their organic traffic slowly decline and not quite understanding why.
Add to that the number of people who have stopped using Google altogether for certain types of searches and are going straight to ChatGPT. “Find me a good accountant in Norwich” is now something people ask an AI directly. If your business is not being mentioned anywhere that the AI can read, you are invisible to those people completely.
This is a sort-it-out-now situation, not a wait-and-see one.
If your website is currently doing nothing for your business and you are generating all of your work through referrals and word of mouth, then honestly, this change does not affect you that much. You are not relying on search to bring in leads, so the shift in how search works is not going to change your day-to-day.
But if you are relying on your website to bring in a steady stream of enquiries each month, or if that is the goal, this is something you need to be investing in seriously right now. The businesses that get on top of this in the next six months are the ones that will own those AI citations when the competition finally wakes up and starts paying attention.
The gap between businesses with a genuinely active, well-maintained online presence and those with a static website nobody touches is about to get a lot wider.
One thing that is true of AI search, and of the broader direction Google has been heading for years, is that it rewards freshness. The AI does not want to serve outdated information. It wants to cite sources that are actively maintained, regularly updated, and demonstrably current.
A website that was built three years ago and has not been touched since is a liability in this environment. Not because it looks old, but because it signals to Google that nobody is paying attention. A website that gets new content, updated pages, fresh case studies, and ongoing SEO work is one that the AI can trust to be accurate.
This is the whole point of what we do at HelloHorizon with our monthly website packages. We treat your website as a living thing rather than a finished product. Regular content, SEO maintenance, and continuous improvements based on what the data is telling us. Not a build-it-and-forget-it job.
If you want to know how your website is currently positioned for AI search, we offer a free audit. We will take a look at where you stand and give you a straight answer about what needs to change.
