What you'll learn:

  • What Google announced at IO 2026 and why it's being called the biggest change to search in 25 years
  • Why 93% of searches now end without a click
  • The difference between AI mentions and citations, and why your Google ranking no longer guarantees visibility
  • Where AI actually pulls its answers from
  • The 3 mistakes most businesses are making right now in the shift to AI search
  • How to run a citation audit in 15 minutes to find out if AI knows your business exists
  • How to identify the unique, original content that AI is most likely to cite
  • Which platforms to focus on - Google Business Profile, YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit - and why each one matters
  • How to build a simple weekly system that grows your AEO presence consistently over 60 day

Google Just Changed Search Forever.  Here's Your 60-Day AEO Plan.

At Google IO 2026, Google announced that AI Mode is now the default search experience for 2.5 billion monthly users. The search box has been rebuilt from the ground up — no longer keyword-based, now driven by full sentences and long prompts — and instead of a list of links, users get one AI-generated answer with a handful of cited sources.

The shocking stat - 93% percent of searches now end without a click to any external website.

That's a structural change to how the internet works.

In this session, we break down what happened, what it actually means for small businesses, and what to do about it with a practical 60-day plan built around Answer Engine Optimization (AEO).

AEO is the practice of building your presence in the places AI trusts most: Google Business Profile, YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit, and your own website, with content that is original, specific, and written for humans rather than search engine crawlers. AI builds its answers from consensus across many sources, and this session shows you how to become one of those sources.

The session walks through a live 60-day planning framework covering a citation audit to find out where you currently stand, how to identify the unique content only you can create, which two channels to focus on, and how to build a weekly system that compounds over time.