Stephen Sumner
Getting cited by AI Overviews: what actually moves the needle
The handful of changes that reliably shift a page from indexed-but-ignored to quoted: top-loading, schema honesty, and the snippet directives nobody remembers setting.
In progress· 8 min
Long-form writing on AI search, local SEO and the legal sector: the frameworks I build, the things I test, and the notes I write to think problems through.
Your Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube posts finally have search data attached to them. The method I'd hand an in-house team: what to set up, what to read in the first 28 days, the two comparisons worth building, and a 30-minute monthly routine that turns query data into better captions.
A business directory is the rare search asset you can actually own — not rent from Google one click at a time. Structured business data, an audience you reach directly, and exactly the kind of source AI answer engines cite. The thesis behind acquiring JusticeDirectory.co.uk, and why directories are the quiet centre of my next phase.
I first wrote this framework seven years ago with four pillars — technical, authority, relevance and experience. They've held up better than almost anything I teach. But 2026 forced a fifth: AI search. The whole thing rebuilt — same bones, every reference current, the obsolete advice cut, and the new pillar argued for properly.
Ranking audits answer one question: can Google rank this page? It is no longer enough. This is the full rubric I run on every client site: what each category measures, why it is weighted the way it is, and what I deliberately refuse to score.
No WordPress, no build step, no JavaScript framework. The whole recipe behind a clean 100 for SEO, accessibility and best practices: hand-written static HTML, self-hosted fonts and images, and one file of edge config, deployed free on Cloudflare — plus an honest word on the one score that isn't 100.
The handful of changes that reliably shift a page from indexed-but-ignored to quoted: top-loading, schema honesty, and the snippet directives nobody remembers setting.
Why NAP consistency still decides local rankings, and a boring, repeatable process for fixing years of drift across directories.
Practice-area pages, review strategy and the trust signals that matter when the searcher has a problem and very little patience.