Search did not die. It split. Every UK brand now competes for two surfaces: ranked links and cited answers in AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini.
58% of UK Google search results on commercial-investigation queries now show AI Overviews — the largest single shift in SERP composition since featured snippets.
The brands winning organic in 2026 have stopped optimising primarily for crawlers and started optimising for citation by language models — through factual density, named authorship, original research, and presence on the sources LLMs already trust.
By Kasim Javed, CEO and Founder of Creative Marketing Group.