Monthly Search Insights: September 2026
This month we look at four developments that could affect how customers find and choose a business: changing Google rankings, the value of useful content, searches that start with an image, and how AI tools present options.
None calls for a change of direction for every business. We will check the evidence for your website and recommend action where it could help you reach the right customers and achieve a meaningful result.
In this report:
Google rankings: why a short-term change needs context before action.
Useful content: why publishing more pages is not a strategy in itself.
Searching with an image: what new Google data may tell us about discovery.
AI research: how we are testing where a business appears in relevant answers.
Understanding changes in Google rankings
Google rankings can change even when there is no announced major update. Search results are becoming increasingly dynamic and can vary based on factors such as location, device, personalisation and changes Google is continually making to its systems. Sometimes, simply refreshing the same search can show a slightly different set of results
What this means for your business
Because of this, we place less emphasis on a single ranking checked at one moment in time. Instead, we look at average positions, overall movement and trends over time to understand whether visibility is genuinely improving or declining. A single keyword moving up or down does not tell us whether fewer potential customers are finding you. We need to look at the pattern over time, the pages and searches affected, website visits and the enquiries, bookings or sales that matter to your business.
What we are doing to support this
We review ranking changes alongside traffic, customer actions and wider search trends. If a change is substantial or sustained, we investigate its likely causes before recommending work. This gives us a much more reliable view of your actual search visibility and helps us focus our time on changes that could genuinely affect your business.
Why useful content matters more than page volume
Google’s published guidance warns against creating large numbers of pages mainly to gain search visibility when those pages add little value for people. This applies whether the pages are produced with AI, templates or by hand. Technology can help create content, but each page still needs a useful purpose.
What this means for your business
Publishing more pages will not necessarily bring more of the right customers. A service page should explain what you offer and help someone decide whether to enquire. A product page should answer the questions that support a purchase. Your own experience, examples and clear information are often more useful than another generic page.
What we are doing to support this
We look for gaps in the information customers need and improve the pages that matter to their decisions. We also review existing content where it could be strengthened, combined or removed. We will only recommend new pages where there is a clear customer need and a business reason to create them.
Searching with an image
Not every search starts with typed words. Someone might photograph a product in a shop, select an object they have seen on their phone or upload an image to identify something similar. They may then add words to narrow the search, compare options or find somewhere to buy it.
Google has introduced a new “Multimodal” search filter in Search Console. In simple terms, this gives us a new way to see when people have reached your website after starting their search with an image rather than just typed words. This gives us new visibility into how people find websites through image-led searches, and reinforces the importance of having relevant, high-quality and well-optimised images that Google can understand.
What this means for your business
This will not be equally important for every business. For companies where customers rely heavily on images, such as ecommerce, interiors, landscaping or project-based services, it could become a useful source of visibility. For others, traditional Google searches and local results are likely to remain far more important. We will only focus on this data where it is genuinely relevant to how your customers search.
What we are doing to support this
We will check the new data where it is available and relevant, starting with the product, category or service pages that matter most to customers. If image-led discovery looks significant, we will look at whether Google can find and access the important images and whether any site settings accidentally prevent it from doing so.
We will also review how clearly the images explain what is being offered. This includes descriptive file names, accurate alternative text for people who cannot see an image, and useful headings, captions and product or service details around it. Where possible, real images of products, completed projects, places or the people delivering a service can help customers assess a business more confidently than generic stock photography. We will recommend changes in order of likely value to your customers, not a blanket exercise to rename every image.
Helping your business appear in relevant AI answers
Customers are increasingly using AI tools such as ChatGPT to research services, compare businesses and help decide who to contact. These tools can mention businesses directly, recommend options and reference information from websites and other sources across the web.
Your website remains a hugely important part of that picture, but a single prompt cannot tell us how visible your business is across AI search. To understand that properly, we need to look at a much broader range of realistic customer prompts and identify patterns within the results.
What this means for your business
The important question is whether AI platforms can find and understand clear, trustworthy information about your business when potential customers are researching the services or products you offer.
Simply being mentioned isn’t the objective. We want to understand whether your business appears for relevant prompts, how often it appears, how it is presented, which competitors appear alongside it and which sources are influencing or being referenced in those answers.
Your website is only one part of the information AI platforms may encounter. Reviews, relevant independent mentions and consistent business information across the web can also help customers, and AI platforms, understand and assess your business.
Ultimately, AI visibility is only valuable if it helps the right potential customers discover and consider your business, supporting outcomes that matter to you such as a qualified enquiry, booking or sale.
What we are doing to support this
We have recently brought a data science expert into the Artemis team to help us develop a much more detailed way of measuring and understanding AI visibility.
The amount of data involved can be significant. Rather than relying on a handful of individual prompts, we can test large numbers of realistic customer prompts across the services, locations and buying situations relevant to your business. Our data science expertise helps us analyse those results at scale, identify meaningful patterns and turn a large volume of information into something commercially useful.
This helps us understand which prompts your business appears for, how frequently it appears, where competitors are being surfaced instead, how your business is being presented and which sources are being referenced or influencing the answers.
Our focus is not simply on whether your business was mentioned by an AI platform. We want to use the data to identify practical opportunities, such as making key services clearer, strengthening evidence of experience and expertise, improving the information AI platforms can find and understand about your business, or correcting inconsistent information across the web.
As with all of our work, we will focus on recommendations where the evidence shows there is a meaningful opportunity to improve your visibility and, ultimately, generate more of the right enquiries, bookings or sales. This gives us a stronger evidence base for keeping your business well positioned as AI becomes a more established part of how customers research, compare and choose.
Final Thoughts
The biggest theme this month is that search is becoming broader, more dynamic and more complex. People are not only finding businesses through traditional Google searches, but increasingly through images, AI tools and a wider mix of online sources. That makes it even more important to look beyond individual rankings and focus on the bigger picture: how visible your business is, whether the right people are finding you and whether that visibility is turning into enquiries, bookings or sales.
Our job is to make sense of that changing landscape for you. We are continuing to strengthen the SEO foundations that matter now, while also investing in new ways to understand emerging behaviour and opportunities before they become mainstream.
That means we will not chase every new feature or react to every short-term movement. We will focus on the changes that genuinely matter to your business, use the evidence to guide our recommendations and keep your strategy moving in the right direction as search continues to evolve.
