Same words, same phone, one minute apart. A national chain made page one on Google and was missing from the AI answer. Here's what the winner had.
Ok, so AI does not read the same way SEO for Google does. Here is real time proof.
On October 4 I typed one search twice on the same phone, a minute apart. Incognito window. No business name in the question.
“Best massage place near Winter Park FL for a deep tissue massage.”
Once in regular Google. Once in Google’s AI Mode.
What came back:
Regular Google, page one: Yelp, Spavia Winter Park, Hand and Stone, TripAdvisor, Reddit. Two directories, two spas, a forum.
AI Mode, same words: Destress Unwind Therapy, Spavia Winter Park, Grey Orchid, Winter Park Massage and Wellness, J Sterling Wellness Spa.
Hand and Stone is a national chain on page one of Google. It’s not in the AI answer. Three of the five businesses AI named aren’t on page one of Google at all.
One business is on both lists.
I’m not the only one who noticed this. A group of researchers compared regular Google results with Google’s AI Overviews across thousands of searches and published it at ACL 2026. 53% of the websites the AI Overviews pulled from were not in Google’s top ten for the same search. More than half. The AI is working off a different list than Google is.
What this measures:
AI findability is whether an AI answer names your business when someone asks for your kind of service in your town, without typing your name.
It’s separate from ranking on Google.
The two systems pull from different things, and on October 4 they didn’t agree.
If your business looks fine on Google and you’ve never seen the AI name your business as an answer, that’s what I do. I run the test, then fix what keeps you out of the answer, in the tools you already have, and you never learn a new app. Details at the bottom.
What the top AI result had that the others didn’t:
The spa at the top of the AI answer got more than its name listed. The answer quoted its own customers: therapy “tailored to chronic knots, not a cookie-cutter spa routine.” That line came straight out of its reviews. It has 726 of them at 5.0 stars, and the AI read them and repeated one.
The others got a name and three buttons: Call, Directions, Website.
The September test said the same thing
On September 18 I ran a deep tissue search near Winter Park in AI Mode. Five places came back. Four got Call, Directions, Website.
One got its price quoted inside the answer.
Sixty-five dollars for a thirty-minute deep tissue.
Open slots Friday and Saturday.
A card that opened its booking calendar in one tap.
That business has a page that says the service name, how long it takes, what it costs, and which times are free. Those are four things an AI can read right off the page, so that’s what it repeated.
The other four have websites too. Good ones. Theirs say “contact us for pricing” and “call to schedule.” A person will call you. AI won’t. It has nothing to say about you, so it hands over the only thing it has, which is your phone number.
How they pick:
What decides it is whether there’s something on your page they can quote. Your budget and how long you’ve been around don’t come into it.
Researchers at Princeton and IIT Delhi tested this across 10,000 queries and published it at KDD 2024. Pages that added quotations, statistics and cited sources boosted their visibility in AI answers by up to 40%. Keyword stuffing made it worse. That lines up with what I saw. The spa with real, specific details on its page is the one that got quoted.
What I made sure of:
I used an incognito window so my search history couldn’t steer it. Same words both times, same phone, same minute. I never typed a business name, because that proves nothing. Type the name and the business shows up every time.
One unglamorous thing nobody tells you:
AI answers move. Run the same search next week and the list can change.
That same research team ran their searches again two months later. Only 18% of the web pages showed up both times in the AI Overviews. Regular Google kept 45% of its pages. So the AI side moves around a lot more than Google rankings do.
That’s why I put the date on the screenshot. The pattern stays the same though. The businesses that get quoted are the ones that gave the AI something to quote.
Something you can try today
Open Google on your phone. Type: best [what you do] near [your town]. Read page one.
Switch to AI Mode. Type the same words. Read the list.
If you’re on the first and missing from the second, that’s a problem for your business. It’s fixable, and without building a new website.
Frequently asked questions:
I’m on page one of Google. Doesn’t that cover AI?
No. On October 4 a national chain was on page one of Google and absent from the AI answer for the same words. Google rankings and AI answers are built from different things.
What does AI quote from a business?
Plain facts on a page it can read: the service name, how long it takes, the price, open times, and sentences from reviews. “Call for pricing” gives it nothing to work with.
Do reviews matter for AI answers?
Yes. The spa at the top of the AI answer had a line from its reviews repeated word for word.
Does this change from day to day?
It can. Run the test more than once, date your screenshots, and look for the pattern instead of one result.
Works cited
Kirsten, E., Große Perdekamp, J., Wu, Q., Upadhyay, M., Gummadi, K. P., and Zafar, M. B. “Characterizing Web Search in The Age of Generative AI.” Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, pages 10827–10848. https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.526/
Aggarwal, P., Murahari, V., Rajpurohit, T., Kalyan, A., Narasimhan, K., and Deshpande, A. “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization.” KDD 2024. https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09735
What part of your day annoys you?
What’s the thing you’d love an AI tool to just handle?
Chances are we can figure it out together, without you learning a new app. You just talk to Claude or Gemini or ChatGPT, and the AI does the backend work.
Tell me what annoys you in your workday for your business. I build custom AI solutions for people.