How UK businesses are losing customers to AI search, and what to do

There's a shift happening, and it's moving faster than most business owners realise.

For the past 20 years, "being found online" meant one thing: Google. You hired someone to do your SEO, got some decent content on the site, maybe ran some Google Ads. It worked. Traffic came in.

That model isn't broken. But it's no longer the whole picture. A growing chunk of people (especially younger ones and professionals) are using AI assistants as their first stop for information. Not to browse, not to compare a list of results. Just to get an answer. And those answers don't always include a link to your website.

This article breaks down what's actually happening, what the data shows, what UK copyright law has to do with it, and what you can do right now. No jargon. No scare tactics.

The numbers

Ofcom's 2024 Online Nation report found that more than a quarter of UK adults now regularly use AI assistants for information queries, up from near zero just two years earlier. Among 18–34 year olds, that figure is 47%. Among professionals, 38%.

Gartner projected that traditional search engine volume could drop by as much as 25% by 2026 as AI assistants absorb query traffic. For some types of searches ("how to" questions, comparison queries, local business lookups), the shift is already measurable.

Here's what that means in plain English: someone searches "best plumber in Manchester" on ChatGPT and gets a direct answer. That's a potential customer who never typed anything into Google, never clicked a search result, and never visited your website. They just got an answer.

Were you in that answer? If you haven't thought about this, probably not.

How AI search is different from Google

Traditional search gives you a list. You type something in, you get ten blue links, you pick one.

AI search gives you an answer. The AI pulls from multiple sources, blends the information, and gives you a paragraph (maybe with a footnote, maybe without). Two things about this are very different for businesses.

First: your content might be used without anyone visiting your site. The AI uses your words, summarises your expertise, and answers the question, but you get no traffic, no enquiry, and no sale. That raises both a revenue question and an intellectual property question.

Second: the decision about who gets cited is made by the AI, not the user. It's not like Google, where your ranking determines your visibility. If an AI decides your content is unclear, unstructured, or not permitted for use, it won't quote you, regardless of how good your SEO is. GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) is the practice of making sure you get that citation.

The UK copyright angle

The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA) is the main UK law that protects original creative work, including your website content. It's been around a while, but it's very much relevant to what's happening with AI.

The big question right now: does AI training on your website content count as copyright infringement? The honest answer is that nobody knows yet. The UK Intellectual Property Office ran a consultation on AI and copyright in 2023–24. The creative industries (publishers, music companies, news organisations) strongly opposed any new exception that would let AI companies train on public content without permission. The government's response is still pending.

What is clear: a business that has explicitly stated its AI permissions, with a date stamp, is in a better position than one that hasn't said anything. Not because it's legally ironclad, but because it's evidence. It shows you knew what was happening, you thought about it, and you made a clear decision.

What to actually do about it

You don't need to become an AI expert. Here are four things worth doing.

The bit people miss

Most of the conversation about AI and business focuses on the threat. Fair enough. The threat is real.

But here's the other side: most UK businesses haven't done any of this yet. They're not thinking about AI citations, they haven't written an llms.txt file, they haven't even checked whether they appear in AI responses at all. That gap is an opportunity.

When AI systems build up their citation patterns, the businesses that were visible and properly set up early will get recommended. It's early. It's not complicated. And a lot of it takes less than an hour to sort out.