Nottingham is a proper city. It has a university, a serious retail economy, a growing tech scene, and businesses across every sector competing for the same local customers. It also has, like every UK city, a Google search landscape that is changing faster right now than it has in the past decade.
The reason is artificial intelligence. Google’s search results in 2026 look meaningfully different from what they looked like even two years ago. AI Overviews appear at the top of results for a growing proportion of searches, answering questions directly without the user needing to click through to a website. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI tools are becoming the first stop for research for a growing proportion of the population. The way people find businesses is shifting.
For businesses in Nottingham — whether you’re in Lace Market, Beeston, West Bridgford, or anywhere else in the city — understanding what this means practically is genuinely important. This post tries to explain it without the hype.
What’s Actually Changing in Search
For the past twenty-odd years, SEO has been about getting your website to rank near the top of a list of blue links. Someone searches for ‘plumber Nottingham’, Google shows ten results, and the goal is to be in the top three. That model still applies for a huge proportion of searches — probably the majority. But it’s being layered over with something new.
Google’s AI Overviews (the AI-generated summaries that now appear at the top of many search results pages) pull information from multiple sources and synthesise an answer. For informational searches — ‘how do I find a good accountant’, ‘what are business rates in Nottingham’, ‘best restaurants near the city centre’ — the AI summary often answers the question without the user needing to scroll down to the websites below it.
This is sometimes called a zero-click search, and the proportion of searches that end without a click to any website has been growing for years. AI Overviews accelerate that trend.
What This Means for Nottingham Businesses
Here’s the nuance that gets lost in a lot of AI-and-SEO coverage: not all searches are affected equally. Informational queries — the kind where someone is researching, learning, or comparing — are most likely to be answered by an AI summary. Transactional and local queries — ‘book a table in Nottingham’, ’emergency locksmith Hucknall’, ‘buy running shoes Arnold’ — still tend to produce traditional results with map packs and organic links, because the intent is to do something rather than just learn something.
For most Nottingham businesses, the practical implication is this: the traffic you care most about — people looking for your specific product or service in your specific location — is relatively protected from the AI Overview shift. Someone searching for ‘best physiotherapist West Bridgford’ is not going to be satisfied by an AI summary. They want to find an actual business, see its reviews, and book an appointment.
But your informational content — blog posts, guides, FAQs — may see declining click-through rates even if it continues to rank. Someone reading an AI summary of an article you wrote will learn from your expertise without visiting your site.
The Opportunity Side of This
Here’s the less obvious part: AI Overviews pull their information from somewhere. When Google’s AI cites a source, that source gets a kind of visibility that, in some ways, is more valuable than a traditional ranking. Your brand name appears in the answer, associated with the topic. That’s brand exposure to a user who might not have clicked on your organic listing anyway.
Businesses and websites that are most likely to be cited in AI Overviews are those with: clearly written, accurate, well-structured content that directly answers specific questions; strong domain authority (Google trusts them); and established expertise on the topic (as evidenced by existing rankings, mentions, and backlinks).
In other words, the things that make you rank well in traditional search are very similar to the things that make you likely to be cited in AI summaries. Good SEO and good AI visibility are not different disciplines. They’re the same discipline.
What Nottingham Businesses Should Actually Be Doing
None of what’s happening in AI search requires a completely different strategy from good, well-executed SEO. But there are some practical adjustments worth making:
- Make sure your Google Business Profile is complete, accurate, and actively managed. Local pack visibility — the map results that show up for local searches — is not going away, and your GBP is its foundation.
- Write content that genuinely answers questions your Nottingham customers ask. Not keyword-stuffed fluff, but real answers. This is what AI Overviews cite. If you’re an accountant in Nottingham and you write the best, clearest guide to setting up as a sole trader in the UK, you’re a candidate to be referenced.
- Build your reviews. On Google, on Trustpilot, on whatever platform is relevant to your sector. Reviews influence local pack rankings and they’re a trust signal that AI systems factor into their understanding of your business’s quality.
- Don’t abandon traditional SEO. The shift toward AI search is real but gradual. The websites winning the most organic traffic in Nottingham in three years’ time will be the ones that invested in SEO now, not the ones that waited to see how things settled.
A Realistic Outlook
SEO in Nottingham in 2026 is not a crisis. For local service businesses — the tradespeople, the healthcare providers, the solicitors, the restaurants, the retailers — the fundamentals of being found online haven’t changed as dramatically as some of the headlines suggest. Local intent searches still produce local results. Google still wants to connect people with the best nearby businesses for their needs.
What has changed is the informational layer of search — and that shift will continue. Building a business that earns genuine authority in its space, in its city, through consistently useful content and a strong local presence, is the right response to that change. It always was.
