Digital government discovery in the AI era: What public-sector leaders should prioritize

This is a two-part guide for government agency teams who want to ensure that AI tools and search engines help residents find digital services. You don’t need a background in web development or SEO to benefit from this series. Part one helps you assess how your website is doing today.

Part 1: The way people search is changing — has your website kept up?

Most residents look for government services the same way they look for everything else: they search for them online. If it sends them to your online service, they quickly pay their bill and move on. Making it easy to find your services is one of the most important ways to drive digital channel adoption.

But how search works is changing fast, and it’s worth understanding even if you never touch your website.

You don’t need to be a web developer or know anything about SEO to follow along. In this first part, we’ll look at how residents search today and give you a simple, 10-minute way to see how your own services show up. Part two covers what makes a page easy to find and exactly what to ask the team that manages your site.

The way we search has changed

For 20 years, online search meant typing a few keywords into Google and scanning a list of blue links. That is still happening, but two major changes are underway:

First, Google now answers many questions directly at the top of the page. AI Overviews appear before the usual list of links on nearly half of US searches today, and that number is growing. When an AI Overview appears, the click-through rate to the top result drops by about a third. So even if you rank first, fewer people reach your page than they did two years ago, unless your page is the source the summary is built from.

Second, a growing number of people now start with an AI assistant instead of a search engine. ChatGPT reached about 900 million weekly users in early 2026. More than a third of consumers now say they begin an information search with an AI tool. About 35% of Gen Z use an AI chatbot to look things up. Tools like ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude don’t return a list of links. They read the web, decide what the answer is, and hand back a paragraph.

And while the average Google search is about four words, the average question typed into ChatGPT is about 23 words. People no longer type “Jackson County property tax.” They type “how do I pay my property taxes in Jackson County if I lost the paper bill?” Your website has to answer the question clearly for an AI assistant to find it and share it with the user.

Our own consumer research measured how AI search is impacting government services specifically. Across all respondents, 12.4% said they used an AI tool to find the service they needed. Among Gen Z respondents, 22.3% reported using an AI tool to find the service they needed.

Checking the AI visibility of your site is easy — no expertise needed

You don’t have to take any of this on faith. You can see how your own services perform in about the time it takes to get coffee. Do it the way a resident would, not the way an insider would. There are two steps:

Step 1: Open a private (“incognito”) browser window first. A private window ignores your history and location, so you see close to what a stranger sees instead of the results your own habits have trained. This matters, because you already know exactly where your pages are, and Google knows you know. In Google Chrome, it’s Command+Shift+N on a Mac or Control+Shift+N on Windows.

Now type in a question the way a confused resident would. Try things like:

When the results are returned, take note of these questions:

Step 2: Ask the same questions inside the AI tool of your choice: ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Perplexity, or Claude. Ask in plain English, like “how do I pay my property tax bill in [your county]?”

Then check:

Write down what you find for two or three of your highest-traffic services. That short list is the beginning of your priority list for the web team. Our next installment of this series will help you when it’s time to engage them. We’ll provide a plain-language description of what makes a page easy to find and turn your notes into a simple, prioritized ask for whoever manages your site.