I Made It Into Google’s AI Overview. Here’s What I Think Helped
I wasn’t trying to optimize for AI search. I was trying to build a more useful digital presence. Then something unexpected happened.
I wasn’t trying to get my business into Google’s AI Overview, and I certainly wasn’t running some elaborate SEO/AEO campaign designed to make it happen. I haven’t spent a fortune trying to rank for hundreds of keywords, nor have I discovered some magical formula for convincing the robots that my small business, JBits Connects, is worthy of their attention.
What I have been doing is getting much more intentional about my digital presence. I’ve been publishing what I know, answering questions I hear from small business owners, and developing my Digital House Framework so I can put clearer language around something I’ve believed for a long time: marketing works better when the pieces connect.
A big part of that work has been about establishing my own thought leadership. Not in a look at me, I’m a thought leader kind of way, because even typing that makes me cringe. I mean taking the things I’ve learned over more than 20 years in marketing, combining them with what I’m seeing in my work today, and putting those ideas somewhere other people can actually use them.
I’ve also been building better systems around the content I create, because hitting “publish” is no longer the end of the process. All of that has been intentional.
Getting into Google’s AI Overview? That part was not.
Yes, It Started With a Vanity Search
I was doing some housekeeping in Google Search Console, a free tool from Google that helps you understand how Google sees your website. I’ve been using it to check whether my pages are indexed, submit URLs when necessary, and pay closer attention to internal and external links Google sees.
At some point, I opened an incognito window and typed "JBits Connects" into Google. I wanted to see what came up and establish another benchmark for where my business is now so I can compare it with where I’m going.
Was this essentially a vanity search for my own business? Yes. Was it for research purposes? Obviously.
But what came back made me stop.
Google didn’t simply return my website. Its AI Overview had assembled a surprisingly accurate description of JBits Connects, including language about helping small business owners build structured marketing systems, clarify their message, create genuine audience connections, and move away from random acts of marketing.
It also identified areas including message clarity, marketing systems, practical AI integration, and local engagement. In other words, Google seemed to have developed a pretty good understanding of the things I’ve been deliberately working to become known for.
My immediate reaction was essentially, Well, hello there. How did THAT happen?
So I Started Looking Backward
Before we go any further, I need to be clear about something: I cannot prove that anything I’m about to share is exactly why Google included JBits Connects in its AI Overview.
Search is complicated, AI search is evolving ridiculously quickly, and I do not have a secret line into Google explaining why it chooses one source over another. Finding my own business in an AI Overview also does not suddenly make me an AI search guru, nor does it mean JBits Connects will appear every time someone asks a marketing-related question (not yet, at least).
What I can do is look backward at what I’ve been doing differently, pay attention to what is happening, and look for patterns.
I think every small business owner should be doing some version of this. I think of it as observing my own small-business laboratory: trying things, building things, paying attention to what happens, looking for evidence, learning from it, and adjusting accordingly.
When I looked around my own little laboratory, I could see seven things that I think may have contributed to what I found.
1. I Started Publishing What I Know
Last year, blogging was not a consistent part of my marketing. This year, it is, but before you picture some enormous content operation behind the scenes, please don’t.
JBits Connects is a very small business. I’m a solopreneur with an offshore team that handles administrative and implementation tasks; there is no content department down the hall cranking out five articles a week. I generally publish about two articles a month. Some months I’ve published three; one month I've published none, and somehow the internet has survived.
What has changed is my intention behind those articles. Increasingly, I’m using them to put language around what I know, what I believe about marketing, and what I want JBits Connects to become known for.
For example, when I wrote Your Marketing Isn’t Broken. It’s Just Not Connected, I was articulating one of the central ideas behind my Digital House Framework. Your website, content, email, social media, offers, and other marketing assets shouldn’t operate as a collection of unrelated activities; they should support one another as parts of a larger system.
I wrote that article to help people understand the framework. But now I find myself wondering whether putting those ideas into clear language has also helped Google better understand what JBits Connects is about.
I can’t prove that it has. But I certainly gave Google more useful information to work with.
2. I’m Publishing Consistently Enough
I want to pause on the word "consistency" because I think small business owners often hear it and immediately translate it into "MORE". More blog posts, more emails, more Reels, more social posts, more everything until marketing becomes another full-time job nobody has time for. No. No, thank you. That isn’t what I mean.
I’m not publishing constantly; I’m publishing consistently enough to build something over time. Every useful article becomes another asset in my Digital House. It gives a prospective client another way to discover me, understand how I think, or get an answer to a question. Unlike a social post that may disappear from someone’s feed fairly quickly, an article on my website has the opportunity to continue doing its job.
I’m seeing small signs of that in my own analytics. People who land on several of my articles are spending four minutes or more reading them, and one currently shows an average time on page of more than eight minutes.
Those aren't giant internet-celebrity numbers, and that isn't the point.
Time is evidence of attention.
If someone spends four, five, or eight minutes reading something I wrote, that piece of content is doing a job.
This is exactly what I wrote about in The Visibility Was Already Working. They Just Didn’t Know It Yet. Sales and revenue matter, of course, but they're lagging indicators; there are earlier signs that tell us whether our visibility may be growing before those outcomes appear.
But This Isn't Really About My Content…It’s about YOURS
I realize I've spent a lot of time talking about what I've been publishing, but this is the point where I want to turn the conversation back to you. Because the lesson isn't that you need to start writing articles about digital marketing. Please don't. You’ve got your lane, and I’ve got mine.
The point is that you know things.
If you're an interior designer, you've developed a way of looking at a room that your clients simply don't have. If you're a health coach, you probably answer the same questions again and again and have your own way of helping people make changes that actually stick. If you teach workshops, consult, coach, design, build, sell, organize, advise, or provide a professional service, there are many, many things you understand because you've spent years doing the work.
You may even have a methodology or framework you've never formally named. You probably have opinions about what people in your industry get wrong. There are questions clients ask you so often that you can answer them without thinking. There are stories you tell to help someone finally understand a complicated idea. You probably have awesome, funny, and creative metaphors. I bet there are things you wish every prospective client knew before they ever called you.
That's the stuff.
That's what I mean when I say “publish what you know.” I'm not suggesting that every small business owner suddenly become a blogger. I'm suggesting that your expertise shouldn't live exclusively in your head, on your client calls, or in the conversations you have over coffee.
Find ways to make some of it visible.
That might become an article, an FAQ, a workshop, a useful page on your website, a newsletter, a video, or a resource you send to clients. The format matters much less to me than the underlying idea: give people something that helps them understand what you know, how you think, and how you help.
Because when you do that, you're creating something useful for a prospective client. And as I'm beginning to see in my own small-business laboratory, you may also be creating clearer signals that help search engines and AI systems understand what your business knows.
3. I Stopped Treating “Publish” as the Finish Line
This may be one of the biggest changes I’ve made this year. When I create an article now, there’s an entire publishing workflow around it.
I think about the title and website description. I add internal links to relevant resources. I consider the questions someone might naturally ask about the subject and create an FAQ when it makes sense. I add alt tag descriptions and make sure the page can be indexed. I decide how the article fits into my newsletter, whether it makes sense for social media, what other content or offers it supports, and what ideas I may want to reuse later.
Frankly, my publishing checklist has gotten a little ridiculous, but I’m starting to see signs that the effort may be paying off.
But here's the important distinction: that doesn't mean I need to create more content. It means I'm becoming more intentional about what happens to the content I do create.
Instead of constantly asking myself, "What do I need to post next?" I’m increasingly asking, "How can this one useful idea do more work?"
That’s a question you can ask whether you’re creating an article, a workshop, a podcast episode, a video, or a useful resource for clients. Creating something valuable takes time; give it more than one job.
That's a very different way to approach content marketing, and for a small business with limited time and resources, I think it's a much more sustainable one.
4. I’m Connecting the Dots Between My Ideas
Internal linking has also become a regular part of my publishing process. Yes, internal links can help search engines understand the relationships between pages on a website, but I use them for an even simpler reason: they're useful to people.
Think about the questions your clients naturally ask next. If you’ve already created something useful that answers that question, connect the two. You’re not just building links; you’re building a path someone can follow through your expertise.
If you're reading an article about visibility and I've already written something that helps you understand how email supports that visibility, why would I make you go hunting for it? If I mention the idea that marketing works better when everything connects, I can point you toward the article that explains my Digital House philosophy in more detail.
One idea naturally leads to another, which means my website slowly stops behaving like a pile of unrelated pages (essentially, digital Random Acts of Marketing) and starts becoming a connected resource.
Come to think of it, that sounds suspiciously like my entire Digital House philosophy.
5. I’m Paying Attention to Whether Google Can Actually Find What I Create
I’ve also become more intentional about using Google Search Console. If you’ve never looked at it before, don’t worry; it’s a free tool from Google that gives you information about how Google is seeing and indexing your website.
I’m not spending my afternoons staring lovingly at SEO dashboards. Holy guacamole, that sounds awful. I’m using Search Console to answer practical questions: Has Google indexed the article I just published? Are there pages that haven’t been indexed? What internal and external links is Google seeing?
If I’ve taken the time to create something useful, I want to make sure I haven’t accidentally left it sitting in some dark corner of the internet where Google doesn’t know it exists.
It isn't glamorous marketing work, but visibility requires being findable. Creating the asset is only useful if people (and the systems they use to search) have a chance of discovering it.
6. My Visibility Isn’t Only Happening Online
There’s another part of this story that would be very easy to leave out in an article about Google and AI search: I leave my house.
I’m pretty active in my local business community and usually attend at least four networking events a month, often more. I also teach monthly workshops, send a newsletter, selectively share on social media, and have conversations about my work all the time.
Those activities don't exist in separate little marketing boxes. Someone can meet me at a networking event and Google me later. Someone can hear me talk about stopping Random Acts of Marketing, see a workshop promotion a few weeks later, and eventually land on an article. Someone else can mention me in their own post, which creates another little piece of my digital footprint.
In fact, one of the things that surprised me most when I expanded the sources behind Google's AI Overview was how varied they were. My website was there, but so were references from LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, local organizations, workshop promotions, and even content other people had posted about me.
I found this particularly funny because I am hardly a prolific social media poster. Truthfully, I struggle to share anything on social media because I don’t want to think one iota about chasing algorithms or how many people gave me a heart on a post. I loathe the idea of that. And, please know that I don't share every article on every platform; I post maybe once a week, and I don't particularly want to. Additionally, I don’t have my own business page on social platforms. I never converted to a business page because I like having popular music on my Stories (which I do enjoy curating).
Yet those pieces of my presence still exist, and together they seem to reinforce a reasonably consistent picture of who I am and what I do.
Being visible and constantly posting are not the same thing.
I have an entire article and workshop about How to Stay Visible Without Living on Social Media, so I'll resist climbing onto that particular soapbox again. For now.
And the same is true for you. Your digital presence doesn’t have to carry the entire burden of your visibility; the conversations you’re having, the communities you’re part of, the workshops you teach, the events you attend or speak at, and the people who talk about your work can all contribute to the larger picture.
7. I’m Building a Website That Does More Than Sell
This may be the most important observation of all.
A brochure website essentially says: Here’s who I am, here’s what I sell, and here’s how to contact me.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but I want my website to do more. I want someone to be able to arrive with a question and find something useful. I want them to understand how I think before they ever decide whether they want to work with me. I want one article to lead naturally into another, and I want the site to become a body of knowledge rather than a static description of my services that may get an edit 18 months later.
In other words, I wasn't trying to build an SEO machine or an AI machine. I was trying to build a better resource for the people I want to serve.
And somewhere along the way, Google seems to have developed a clearer picture of who I am and what JBits Connects is about.
I find that pretty damn interesting.
And that’s what I want for your website too.
I want an author’s website to show me more than where to buy the book. I want an interior designer’s website to help me understand how they approach a space. I want a coach’s website to let me experience their thinking before I ever schedule a call. I want a service business to answer the questions that make a prospective client think, “Oh, these people understand exactly what I’m dealing with!”
Your website has the opportunity to hold your expertise, not just describe your services.
What About the Traffic?
There is another data point worth mentioning, although I don't want to turn this into an analytics article. My website traffic is up significantly year over year, and that growth has been especially noticeable during the same period that I’ve become more consistent about publishing and started offering monthly workshops.
But I wasn't blogging consistently last year, and I am this year. I also wasn't offering monthly workshops, and now I am. I'm networking regularly, emailing, improving my website, creating landing pages, publishing content, and selectively sharing that work on social media.
I can't pull one of those things out and announce, “Aha! THIS caused the growth.”
Nor do I particularly want to, because that would miss the larger lesson I’m seeing in my own small business laboratory: the pieces are working together.
Someone can meet me at a networking event and Google me later. Someone can see a workshop post on Facebook and visit my website. Someone can read an article, follow an internal link to another one, join my email list, attend a workshop months later, and eventually decide they want help.
That path isn't particularly tidy, but neither are people.
That's why I'm much more interested in building and understanding the system than trying to assign every result to a single tactic.
I Am Optimizing for People First
I don't know exactly what AI search will look like a year from now, and neither does anyone else. That's one reason I have very little interest in rebuilding my marketing strategy every time an algorithm changes.
I'd rather invest in things I believe will continue to matter: clear ideas, useful information, a website I own, content that answers real questions, a recognizable point of view, genuine relationships, and a connected marketing system. Then I want to give those things enough consistency and enough time to work. Marketing is a little like growing tomatoes; you don’t plant the seeds on Monday, dig them up on Friday to see if they’re working, and then complain you don’t have salsa on Sunday.
I am optimizing for people first. It turns out that may also have made my business easier for machines to understand.
And I want to keep the result in perspective. After discovering the appearance in AI Overview, I tried several broader searches based on questions a potential client might ask without already knowing JBits Connects exists. My business didn't appear on the first page for any of them.
I actually love knowing that.
It gives me another aspirational benchmark. Google appears to be developing a pretty coherent understanding of JBits Connects when someone searches for me by name; the next question is whether my ideas will eventually begin to appear when someone searches for the problems I help solve.
That's something I can watch over time.
I'm not sharing this story because I've conquered Google. I'm sharing it because something is happening, and instead of chasing the next hack, I want to keep observing my own small business laboratory, paying attention to the signals, and building on what I learn.
So yes, I’m fascinated that Google seems to be developing a clearer understanding of what my business is about. I’m going to keep watching it, testing things, and sharing what I learn from my little small business laboratory.
But what I really want you to take from this isn’t Jen showed up in AI Overview.
I want you to ask: What do I know that isn’t visible yet?
What have you learned from doing your work that could help someone? What questions are you answering over and over again? What do you believe about your industry? What methodology have you developed without even realizing it? What could you put on your website today that would help a future client understand not only what you sell, but why you’re the person they want to learn from or work with?
You already have the raw material. The work is turning it into something people can find, understand, and use.
That’s why I believe…
visibility is built, not hacked.
It takes time, consistency, and connected effort, but I'm here to build a business.
Aren't you?
Want to Start Looking at Your Own Digital House?
You don't need to wait until Google puts your business into an AI Overview before you start paying attention to what your marketing is telling you.
Look at what you've already built. Look at what people are finding. Look at what they're spending time with. Look at which parts of your marketing are connected and which ones are sitting off on their own. Most importantly, start establishing your own benchmarks now so you have something meaningful to compare against later.
That's exactly what the Digital House Workshops are designed to help you do. Each workshop takes one practical area of your marketing and helps you understand it, work on it, and connect it to the larger system, whether we're talking about visibility, content, email, AI workflows, measurement, or something else.
And if you aren't sure which area deserves your attention first, start with the Digital House Assessment. In about 10–15 minutes, you'll get a clearer snapshot of what's working, where the gaps may be, and which part of your Digital House might be worth tackling next.
FAQs
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Start by making your expertise easier to find and understand. Create useful content that answers real customer questions, make sure your website clearly explains what you do, connect related pages with internal links, and use tools like Google Search Console to make sure your content is being indexed. You don't need to publish constantly; focus on creating useful, connected resources consistently over time.
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Not necessarily. I generally publish about two articles a month, and my experience suggests that consistency and usefulness matter more than sheer volume. The goal isn't to feed the content machine; it's to build a body of useful information that demonstrates what you know, answers questions your prospective clients have, and gives both people and search engines a clearer understanding of your business.
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It can be one part of your overall digital presence, but you don't necessarily need to post constantly. In my own Google AI Overview, I was surprised to see sources from LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram alongside my website and other mentions, even though I use social media pretty selectively. Your website, content, email, networking, workshops, local organizations, and mentions from other people and organizations can all contribute to a larger visibility picture.
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Look for earlier signals of attention and visibility. Website traffic, search impressions, indexed pages, time on page, newsletter clicks, workshop registrations, and people moving between related pages can all provide useful evidence that your marketing is gaining traction. Sales matter, but they're often one of the last things to happen (lagging indicators); establishing benchmarks helps you recognize progress sooner.
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Start with what you already know. Think about the questions clients ask repeatedly, the mistakes you see people make, the methodology or framework you use, the stories and metaphors you rely on to explain difficult ideas, and what you wish every prospective client understood before working with you. Your expertise is the raw material. The goal is to turn some of that knowledge into useful resources people (and the robots) can find, understand, and use.