Google Already Answered the Question
Try something for me. Open Google and search for a question one of your customers might ask before they find you. Not your business name. The kind of thing someone types when they have a problem and don't know who to call yet.
I searched "loading dock safety." It's the kind of thing a warehouse manager might Google after a near-miss, or before a compliance audit. Here's what came up.
Before the ads. Before the blue links. Google has already written a full guide. It's listed key safety measures, described best practices, and even included tips for compliance. A warehouse manager reading that might get everything they need without scrolling down at all.
This is Google's AI Overview. If you haven't noticed it yet, you will. It shows up on more and more searches, and it's doing something that used to be the customer's job: reading the websites, pulling out the key information, and writing a summary.
Now look at one of the businesses that keeps showing up in these results.
That's Verge Safety Barriers. We've worked with them for a while, and one of the things we focused on was building out detailed content pages for every area of their expertise. Loading dock safety. Driver safe zones. Warehouse hazard reduction. Not vague marketing copy. Specific, useful information about real problems their customers face.
That content is exactly what Google's AI is looking for. When it writes a summary about loading dock safety, it pulls from pages that actually say something. Verge shows up because their site gives the AI real substance to work with. Businesses with a homepage that says "we provide quality solutions" don't.
You don't control what Google's AI writes about you. But you do control what it has to work with. Specific descriptions of what you do. Detailed content about the problems you solve. Accurate, up-to-date information that a machine can read and relay.
It's not that different from the old days, really. In the Yellow Pages, a good ad with the right details got you the call. Online, good content with the right information gets you into the summary.
The format keeps changing. What earns attention hasn't.
Away from the keyboard: Caves Beach with Panda. He has zero opinions about Google's AI Overview, and honestly that's the energy I needed.
The speech bubble was made with Google's Nano Banana 2, their latest image generation model. You give it a photo and a text prompt and it edits the image. I asked it to add a speech bubble. Took about three seconds.