How to protect B2B leads from AI Overviews: the fix list, in order

In our 304-query UK B2B sample (17 August 2026) an AI Overview showed on 4% of “near me” and city queries and 6% of brand-name searches, against 100% of “what is” queries and 60% of supplier-intent queries. Supplier-intent queries are not immune in the UK sample. So a commercial page has to earn the click with the specifics an AI summary cannot give: price, named people, proof, location, availability. The full numbers and method are on the research page.

Open each service page and check it says, in plain words, all of the following.

1. What you do, in one sentence a stranger would understand.
2. Who it is for: sector, company size, the job title that usually rings you.
3. Where you work: the towns, counties or “UK-wide, based in Leeds”.
4. From what price. “From £450 a month” or “typical projects £3,000 to £8,000” is enough. A page with no price loses to a page with one.
5. Named people with roles, so the buyer knows who they will actually deal with.
6. Proof: accreditations, memberships, insurance, named clients where you are allowed, and one or two short results with numbers.
7. One obvious enquiry path: a phone number and a short form, above the fold and again at the foot. Not three competing buttons.
8. Current and factual. Remove anything out of date, including staff who have left, old prices and last year’s awards.

Then keep the page fast and readable to crawlers: real text on the page, not text inside images or loaded only after a click, headings that say what the section is, and no pop-up that hides the content. If your web person needs a brief, that paragraph is the brief.

AI engines lean on pages that already rank and already list many suppliers. Your own site is one vote; the rest come from directories, reviews, press and other people’s pages. Work through this list.

• Trade directories and professional bodies: your sector’s member directory, the chamber of commerce, any accreditation body that lists members. Fill every field.
• Review sites: Google Business Profile, Trustpilot or the review site your buyers actually check. Ask the last five happy clients for a review this week.
• LinkedIn posts from a named person, not the company page. A director writing about a real job gets read and quoted far more than the company page posting a brochure.
• “Best X in Y” and comparison pages that already rank. Search your own service and town, find the roundups, and ask to be included. Most have a contact form.
• Local and trade press: a short piece on a real project, with your name in it.
• Supplier lists and case studies on client sites. Ask clients to name you on their “our partners” page or in a case study.

Use the same company name, address and one-line description everywhere. Engines match entities by consistency, and “Smith and Co” on one site and “Smith & Company Ltd” on another reads as two firms. Organization schema markup on your own site is routine housekeeping: do it once, then leave it. It is not a lever and on its own it does not get you cited.

• Schema markup as a lever. It is housekeeping. We have not seen it make the difference between cited and not cited.
• Blocking AI crawlers. It removes you from the answers and leaves your competitors in them. For a B2B firm that wants enquiries, that is the wrong trade.
• Chasing every informational keyword. Pick the five questions your buyers actually ask on the phone and make those pages excellent. Leave the rest.
• Rewriting the whole site at once. Do the service pages this month, the top five informational pages next month, the listings the month after.
• “AI SEO” packages that only report. A dashboard telling you that you are not mentioned is not a fix. Ask who does the work and what changes on your site.