SEO trends are changes in the way Google, and now chatbots too, show answers, and so in where the clicks end up. In 2026 the main change has a precise name: AI-generated answers have gone from experiment to a permanent part of the results page, and every search sends fewer visits to websites than it used to.
On 10 October 2026, three of the nine organic results on page one of Google UK for "seo trends" were still about 2024 or 2025, and the snippets list headings ("Optimizing for AI search", "E-E-A-T", "Voice search") rather than measurements. Here we do the opposite. Every trend comes with its primary source and the market where it was measured, and where a figure was missing we measured it ourselves: 24 searches on Google Italy on 6 October 2026 and six on Google UK on 10 October 2026. At the end there are the predictions from previous years that didn't come true: they help you weigh the ones for 2027.
Search in 2024-2026 in nine dates
Facts first, trends after. These are the events that changed UK results pages over the last two years, each with a link to the official source.
| Date | What happened | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 15 August 2024 | AI Overviews reach the UK, with India, Japan, Indonesia, Mexico and Brazil | blog.google |
| 28 July 2025 | AI Mode starts rolling out in the UK | Google UK |
| 10 October 2025 | The Competition and Markets Authority designates Google with strategic market status in general search and search advertising | CMA |
| 27 March 2026 | First core update of the year, completed in 12 days | Search Status Dashboard |
| 19 May 2026 | Google I/O: AI Mode passes 1 billion monthly users, Gemini 3.5 Flash becomes the default model inside AI Mode | blog.google |
| 21 May 2026 | Second core update, almost 12 days to roll out | Search Status Dashboard |
| 3 June 2026 | Search Console announces a report on performance in AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover, for now on some sites. The same day the CMA imposes its publisher conduct requirement on Google | Google Search Central, CMA |
| 30 August 2026 | Manual actions for site reputation abuse stop applying in the European Economic Area. The UK is outside the EEA, so they still apply here | Google Search Central |
| 24 September 2026 | Fourth spam update of 2026, after those of 24 March, 24 June and 18 August | Search Status Dashboard |
Two core updates in eight weeks and four spam updates in six months. If you saw traffic swing in the spring, there's a documented explanation to check before you look for others: we explain how in our guide to Google penalties.
Trend 1: AI Overviews show on 19% to 30% of UK searches, but not the same ones
An AI Overview is the Gemini-generated summary Google shows above the organic results. In the UK it has been live since August 2024, and the estimates of how common it is don't agree. Ahrefs, in a study published in November 2025, found one on 19.1% of 23 million UK keywords, against 20.5% in the United States. Ofcom, in December 2025, wrote that about 30% of searches now show AI overviews, and that 53% of adults say they see these summaries often.
Between 19% and 30% nobody is wrong. Ahrefs counts keywords, Ofcom counts searches: a keyword searched a million times a month and one searched ten times weigh the same in the first count, not in the second. To see how much the type of query matters, on 6 October 2026 we ran 24 Italian queries on Google desktop through DataForSEO, six for each search intent. On 10 October 2026 we repeated a smaller check on Google UK with six queries.
| Intent | Italian test: with AI Overview | Italian test: where the first organic result starts | Google UK check, 10 October 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Informational | 6 of 6 | position 2 in five cases out of six | "what is capital gains tax", "difference between ltd and sole trader": AI Overview on both, first organic result in position 2 (GOV.UK, HSBC) |
| Commercial | 3 of 6 | position 2 or 3 with an AI Overview, position 1 without | "best car insurance", "best current account": AI Overview on both |
| Transactional | 1 of 6 | after the flight, hotel or product boxes | "flights london to rome": no AI Overview, Skyscanner domains hold three of the ten organic places |
| Local | 0 of 6 | position 5, after three local pack listings and the comparison sites | "plumber manchester": no AI Overview, first organic result in position 5, after a row of directories (Checkatrade, Yell, MyBuilder) and three local pack listings |
| Total | 10 of 24 | People Also Ask on 23 queries out of 24 | AI Overview on 4 of 6, People Also Ask on 5 of 6 |
On informational questions the AI answer is always there. On local searches it never is, because there Google already has another answer that keeps the user on the page: the map, which in a second Italian test on 16 commercial searches came before the first organic result in 5 cases, as we explain in our piece on SEO challenges. Among the Italian transactional queries the only case was "preventivo fotovoltaico" (solar panel quote), which on closer inspection is an informational question (how much does it cost?) dressed up as a purchase request. The People Also Ask block, on the other hand, shows up almost everywhere, in both countries, and remains the most widespread feature on the results page.
The samples are small and we say so: 24 queries don't measure Italy, and six don't measure the UK. They're enough, though, to show that the question "how many searches have an AI Overview" has no useful answer without the intent. For a plumber in Manchester the AI answer doesn't exist today. For a site that lives on tax guides it sits above every page that brings in traffic. How it works and which sources it cites is in our guide to AI Overviews.
Trend 2: fewer clicks per search, and the UK has the highest zero-click share
A zero-click search is one that ends without the user opening a website. In the United States SparkToro, using Similarweb panel data, measured 68.01% of Google searches without a click between January and April 2026, against 60.45% in 2024. In the same study the AI Overview appears on more than 20% of searches and, when it does, clicks fall by almost 60%.
The other two numbers that matter are American too. Ahrefs, comparing 300,000 keywords between December 2023 and December 2025 on desktop, calculates that an AI Overview cuts the click-through rate of the first result by 58%, of the second by 50.8% and of the tenth by 19.4%. The Pew Research Center tracked the browsing of 900 US adults in March 2025: with an AI summary they clicked a result on 8% of visits, without one on 15%. Only 1% clicked a link inside the summary.
For the UK there is a market figure. In SparkToro's study published on 16 June 2026, on the same Similarweb panel for January to April 2026, 69.5% of UK Google searches ended without a click, the highest share of the six countries measured, and every thousand searches sent 232 clicks to the open web, against 231 in the United States. Then there are the figures for individual sites: on the 100-keyword set for an Italian site that we analysed in our article on zero-click searches, 6,336 impressions in Search Console produced 63 clicks, a click-through rate of 0.99%.
Anyone who reads "seven searches in ten bring no click" and applies it to their own site is making a mistake. The figure is an average across every kind of search, including queries the site has never ranked for. The number to look at is in your own Search Console, separating queries that show an AI Overview from those that don't.
Trend 3: AI Mode is growing, but it hasn't become the default search
AI Mode is Google's conversational search mode: a tab where the answer is written in full by the model and websites appear as sources in the margin. At Google I/O on 19 May 2026 Elizabeth Reid, head of Search, announced that it had passed 1 billion monthly users, with queries more than doubling every quarter.
That announcement gave rise to a wrong story, which we also found on page one of Google Italy: that AI Mode had become the default search experience. The official post says something else. It's Gemini 3.5 Flash that became the default model inside AI Mode, for everyone, and the new search box is coming to the countries where AI Mode is available. The page that opens when you search is still the classic results page.
Its real weight comes, again, from SparkToro: between January and April 2026, in the United States, AI Mode accounted for 0.34% of Google searches. A billion users and 0.34% of searches can both be true, because many people open it and few searches go through it. The signal worth following is a different one: in the roundup of I/O announcements Google writes that it wants to bring AI Overviews and AI Mode together into a single AI search experience. If that happens, the distinction between the two stops mattering. What changes for SEO is covered in our article on Google AI Mode.
Trend 4: chatbots are growing, the traffic they send is still small
According to OpenAI, ChatGPT passed 1 billion weekly users (August 2026), and Similarweb counts 9.5 billion monthly visits to generative AI platforms in May 2026, up 70% in a year, worldwide. In the UK, in September 2026, StatCounter gives ChatGPT 80.02% of chatbot use, Gemini 10.14%, Copilot 5.61% and Perplexity 2.7%.
One figure feeds the enthusiasm, the other cools it. The first is British: Ofcom reported in April 2026 that 54% of UK adults now use AI tools, rising to 79% among 16-24s. In its December 2025 report it had counted 1.8 billion UK visits to ChatGPT in the first eight months of 2025, against 368 million a year earlier. The second is international: Ahrefs, across 81,947 sites, measured traffic from AI at 0.25% of the total in June 2025. Almost ten times the year before, still under 1%.
Meanwhile Google is holding up. StatCounter gives it 91.39% of searches in the UK in September 2026, with Bing at 6.08%. For a UK business today, being present inside ChatGPT matters more as a shop window than as a source of visits. How to get in there is explained in how to appear in ChatGPT's answers; how much the other engines weigh is on our page about alternative search engines.
Trend 5: in AI answers, brand mentions count for more than links
A December 2025 Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands lined up the signals that go with visibility in AI answers. Brand mentions on the web have a correlation of 0.664 with presence in ChatGPT, 0.709 in AI Mode and 0.656 in AI Overviews. Mentions on YouTube reach about 0.737. Domain Rating stops between 0.266 and 0.326, the number of backlinks lower still.
It's a correlation, not proof of cause. But it points the same way as Seer Interactive: between June 2024 and September 2025, across 3,119 informational queries from 42 companies, brands cited inside the AI Overview had an organic click-through rate 35% higher than those not cited, 0.70% against 0.52%.
An example of category presence is a project we work on in Italy. Macropix, a Milan-based LED wall manufacturer, went from position 88 to 2 for "monitor pubblicitario" (advertising display) and in July 2026 had a 25.55% share of voice on the LED wall cluster, ahead of Amazon at 18.08%. It's the kind of presence the Ahrefs study associates with visibility in AI answers. We haven't measured Macropix's AI citations, so the link remains a hypothesis. The full story is in our case study on SEO for manufacturing.
Trend 6: in the UK the rules are different
Since 30 August 2026 Google no longer applies manual actions for site reputation abuse, meaning action against sections hosted on authoritative sites to borrow their rankings, for users in the European Economic Area. The change followed a European Commission investigation. The UK is outside the EEA, so for searches made here a manual action still hits the section of the site concerned, as before. For the first time one of Google's anti-spam rules has two versions depending on the searcher's country, and the UK sits on the stricter side.
Behind it all is the UK's own competition regime. On 10 October 2025 the Competition and Markets Authority designated Google with strategic market status in general search, noting that more than 90% of UK searches take place on its platform. On 3 June 2026 it imposed its first conduct requirement for publishers: Google must give them effective tools to stop their content being used to power AI features in search such as AI Overviews, let them opt out of the fine-tuning of AI models, and attribute their content with clear links. Google has nine months to implement all the changes, so the full effect isn't visible yet.
The practical consequence for anyone working on the UK market: on timing, the UK results page follows the American one closely (AI Overviews arrived here three months after the US launch in May 2024), but on rules it is starting to go its own way, apart from both the US and the EU.
Trend 7: measuring presence, not just clicks
For two years Search Console added AI answer data to classic search data with no way of separating them. On 3 June 2026 Google announced a report on performance in generative AI features, with impressions in AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover broken down by page, country and device. The rollout is gradual and for now covers only some sites.
In the meantime it's worth tracking three numbers, none of which cost anything: the click-through rate of informational queries compared with the same month a year earlier, impressions on queries that contain the brand name, and how often the brand appears in the answers to ten questions your customers typically ask, checked by hand once a month. How to put them in an SEO report that someone actually reads.
The predictions that didn't come true
A list of trends is only as good as its track record. Rereading previous years' predictions is the quickest way to weigh the new ones.
| Prediction | Who made it | How it turned out |
|---|---|---|
| Search engine volume will drop 25% by 2026 | Gartner, February 2024 | In July 2026 Alphabet reported growing queries and said AI Mode brings additional searches |
| Voice search will change SEO | Trend articles from 2018 onwards, including two still on page one of Google UK for "seo trends" on 10 October 2026 (Flying Cat Marketing and ClickSlice, both with voice search as trend no. 2) | None of the studies cited on this page measures it as a channel of its own. The change came from written AI answers |
| An llms.txt file will get your site read by AI models | SEO plugins and tools, from 2025 | Across 137,210 domains, 97% of the files received no requests at all in May 2026 (Ahrefs) |
| AI Mode becomes the default search | Industry blogs after Google I/O 2026 | Google made a model the default inside AI Mode, not AI Mode itself |
The predictions that fail have one thing in common: they declare a channel finished within a short time. The ones that hold describe a gradual shift in clicks, which is what the 2026 data shows. We've written a separate guide on the llms.txt file.
What to expect in 2027
This is where the data ends and our reading begins, and we keep the two apart.
- AI Overviews and AI Mode will move closer together. Google said so after I/O 2026. For websites it means the summary will more often be the start of a conversation, and the click will come later or not at all.
- Informational queries without clicks will keep growing in the UK, at roughly the American pace. In the United States zero-click rose by 7.5 points in two years. The UK is already level with the US (232 clicks per thousand searches against 231) and 54% of adults use AI tools, so there's no reason to expect a slower rhythm here.
- Local and transactional searches will stay classic results-page territory for longer. In our Italian test the AI Overview appeared on one query in twelve there, and in the UK check on neither of the two.
- UK rules will keep the UK results page apart from both the American and the European ones, as has already happened with site reputation abuse. The CMA's publisher controls are due by spring 2027, nine months after June 2026.
One prediction we won't make: the date SEO ends. Plenty of people have announced it, yet in July 2026 Sundar Pichai reported billions of clicks a week to websites from Google's AI features alone. If your question is broader, we've covered it in SEO and AI: what has really changed.
What to do now on a UK site
Five moves, in order of cost.
- Split your Search Console queries by intent and compare the click-through rate on informational queries over the last twelve months. That's where AI Overviews take clicks away.
- Move part of the work onto pages that answer commercial and local searches, where the classic results page holds up. If you have physical premises, the starting point is local SEO.
- Work on brand mentions away from your site: trade press, YouTube, industry directories. In the Ahrefs study it's the signal most closely correlated with visibility in AI answers.
- Be wary of "AI optimisation" packages built on llms.txt or formatting tricks: there's no data behind them.
- Once a month, check the brand's presence in AI answers with ten fixed questions. If you'd like to do it with us, it's part of our SEO for AI service, alongside classic SEO.
The time it takes to see an effect hasn't changed, and we've measured it in how long SEO takes to show results. For context figures on the market, see our page of SEO statistics.
Frequently asked questions about SEO trends
There are four, all documented: the spread of AI Overviews, the fall in clicks per search, the growth of AI Mode and chatbots, and the weight of brand mentions in AI answers. In the UK there are also rules of its own: the CMA's publisher conduct requirement of 3 June 2026, and site reputation abuse manual actions that still apply here after 30 August 2026, when they stopped in the EEA.
No. Google has 91.39% of searches in the UK according to StatCounter (September 2026) and Alphabet reports growing queries. What changes is how clicks are distributed: fewer on informational questions, almost unchanged on local and transactional searches.
It depends on how you count. Ahrefs found one on 19.1% of 23 million UK keywords (November 2025); Ofcom puts it at about 30% of searches (December 2025). In our check of 10 October 2026 on Google UK, the AI Overview appeared on both informational queries and on neither the local nor the transactional one.
Yes, it started rolling out on 28 July 2025. It's a separate search tab, not the default results page.
Not for SEO reasons. An Ahrefs study of 137,210 domains found that 97% of llms.txt files received no requests at all in May 2026.
Usually not much. Ahrefs measured AI traffic at 0.25% of the total across 81,947 sites (June 2025, international sample). There is no UK market figure for referral traffic: you'll find your own site's in GA4 by filtering referrals from chatgpt.com.
One thing the industry rarely says. Almost all the SEO trends you'll read about in the coming months were measured in the United States. For a UK site that matters less than it seems on the clicks: AI Overviews arrived here three months after the US, and the two markets send almost the same number of clicks per thousand searches. Where the UK parts company is the rules, from site reputation abuse to the CMA's publisher controls, and those are exactly the trends an American list won't tell you about.
