B2B marketing agency Social Hire has reported a series of SME businesses, many of which previously had little or no presence on Google, succeeding in getting their brands recommended in Google’s AI Overviews.
AI Overviews are the AI-generated answers that now appear at the top of Google search results on around 85% of searches globally. The news is significant for smaller firms because it shows that the businesses AI engines choose to recommend are not decided by company size or marketing budget. Instead, any small business with a clearly defined niche can potentially achieve the same result, appearing as the recommended option at the very moment prospects are searching for suppliers.
Social Hire, founded by Tony Restell, began 2026 determined to master Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) for its own business, recognising that a growing share of B2B buyer research now starts with a question posed to an AI engine rather than a traditional web search. Interest from existing clients who wanted the same outcome led the company to launch AEO as a new service.
Since September 2026, a series of Social Hire’s SME clients have appeared as recommendations in Google’s AI Overviews, in some cases less than a month after starting work together. Rather than competing for attention on a crowded results page, those businesses are now named directly in the AI-generated answer that buyers read first, with reasons given for why they are the best supplier to choose.
Four practical steps
The company’s approach rests on four steps, which it recently set out in a live briefing call. The briefing notes and recording are available on the Social Hire website.
1. Clear positioning. AI engines reward niche specialists over generalists, unless a firm happens to be a global brand on the scale of McKinsey, so the clearer and narrower a business’s area of expertise, the more confidently the engines can recommend it. What matters is not just that positioning is clear on the company’s own website, but that the AI engines themselves understand it. Every place a business has a digital footprint, from its website and LinkedIn company page to its Crunchbase profile and even its booking pages, must carry the same message.
2. Adding schema markup. Schema is code placed on a website that tells AI engines what the business is expert in, who its ideal audience is, which services it offers, which countries it serves and who founded it. It also links the business to its Wikidata, Crunchbase, LinkedIn, X and YouTube profiles, creating a larger verified footprint across the web. Schema can also add question-and-answer (FAQ) blocks to every page, greatly increasing the FAQ information the engines are fed without the business having to write new content. Social Hire advises starting with the homepage and main menu pages: meaningful results can come from optimising only a fraction of a website.
3. Building external validation. AI engines are wary of recommending a firm on the strength of its own website claims alone. Three routes work well: detailed client reviews on external sites such as Google Reviews, Clutch or G2 that repeat the firm’s specific claims in clients’ own words; external publications, blogs, LinkedIn posts, YouTube videos and Reddit threads saying good things about the firm; and appearances in ‘Best’ lists alongside firms the engines already respect.
4. Answering buyer-intent questions. Beyond ‘who are the best firms for X’ questions, prospects increasingly ask AI engines questions shortly before they want to engage a firm, such as “Should my corporate training company do its own social media, or should we outsource?” Businesses that answer these questions with their own content find the engines connect that expertise to the firm, putting it on a buyer’s radar in the weeks before shortlists are drawn up.
Being the firm an AI engine recommends will matter more to SME growth than ranking well on page one ever did.
Results in under 30 days
The impact is documented in a recent five-client case study. In under 30 days of onboarding, five B2B clients went from not appearing in AI recommendations at all to being recommended by Google as the best in their niches: a Rec2Rec recruitment agency in North America, an AI event-sales technology firm, a mining-sector recruitment agency in Canada, a matrix-management consulting and training firm, and an executive recruitment franchise in the United States.
Results so far have come for firms across recruitment, consulting, technology and professional services, and the approach applies to any B2B SME with a clear niche. The company believes that, as AI-generated answers continue to replace traditional search results as the starting point for B2B buyer research, being the firm an AI engine recommends will matter more to SME growth than ranking well on page one ever did.
Social Hire now offers an AI performance assessment for firms that want to see how they currently perform in AI searches across the major engines, including Google.
About Social Hire
Social Hire is a results-focused B2B marketing agency offering Answer Engine Optimisation and social media lead generation for SMEs, with clients across the UK, the US and Canada. It was founded by Tony Restell.
