How to show up in AI search (ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews)

To show up in AI search, your business has to be easy for these tools to find, read and trust. In practice: let their crawlers into your site, describe each service in plain text on its own page, answer the questions customers really ask, keep your Google Business Profile and directory listings consistent, and get mentioned on other credible sites. There is no separate registration and no special code. Google says plainly that there are "no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode", and ChatGPT and Perplexity each rely on their own search crawler. Below is what these tools read, a checklist to become citable, and a test you can run in twenty minutes.

SEO, GEO, AEO: is this a new discipline?

You will see new acronyms: GEO (generative engine optimization), AEO (answer engine optimization), LLMO. They describe a real shift in how people search, but most of the work is the same as good SEO. The tools that write AI answers still have to find pages, decide which ones are reliable, and pull a short answer from them.

What changes is the emphasis:

• Answers over keywords. An AI tool answers a full question ("which commercial cleaner in Laval works weekends and is insured?"). Pages that state facts clearly get quoted. Pages full of slogans don't.
• Being mentioned, not only ranked. AI answers often name several businesses and cite sources. Mentions on directories, local media, association sites and review platforms count.
• Consistency. If your website, Google Business Profile and directory listings disagree about your hours, area or services, the tools have less reason to trust any of them.

What each tool reads

Google AI Overviews and AI Mode

These draw from Google's normal search index. According to Google's documentation for site owners, a page has to be indexed and eligible to appear in Search with a snippet to be shown as a supporting link. No special markup is needed. Google's advice is the usual fundamentals: allow crawling, use internal links, keep important content in text form, make sure structured data matches the visible text, and keep your Business Profile up to date.

Traffic from AI Overviews and AI Mode is included in the Web search type of the Search Console performance report. It is not reported separately, so you can't isolate it there.

ChatGPT search

OpenAI uses a crawler called OAI-SearchBot to surface websites in ChatGPT's search features. Sites that block it are not shown in ChatGPT search answers, though they can still appear as navigational links. A separate crawler, GPTBot, collects content that may be used to train OpenAI's models. The two settings are independent: you can block GPTBot (training) and still allow OAI-SearchBot (search). OpenAI says changes to robots.txt can take about 24 hours to apply to search.

Perplexity

Perplexity uses PerplexityBot to surface and link websites in its results, and says it is not used to train AI models. To appear, Perplexity recommends allowing PerplexityBot in your robots.txt.

The checklist to become citable

Access

• Check your robots.txt file (yourdomain.com/robots.txt). Make sure it does not block Googlebot, OAI-SearchBot or PerplexityBot.
• Check your hosting or security service. Google's own guidance tells site owners to allow crawling at the CDN or host level too, because firewalls and bot-protection settings can block crawlers even when robots.txt allows them.
• Make sure important pages are not marked noindex and are linked from your menu or other pages.

Content that can be quoted

• One page per service, with a clear title ("Office cleaning in Laval") and the facts a buyer needs: what's included, who it's for, the area served, how long it takes, and a price range or "starting at" figure if you can publish one.
• Answer the questions customers ask on the phone, in full sentences, on the relevant page. A short FAQ section works well when the answers are specific.
• Put the answer first. The first sentence under each heading should answer the question. Explanations come after.
• Keep key information in text, not only inside images, videos or PDFs.
• Use real specifics: numbers, names of neighbourhoods, materials, certifications, response times. Vague claims ("quality service, competitive prices") give a tool nothing to quote.

Trust signals

• Who you are: an About page with the owner's name, experience, licences and the year the business started. Google's own guidance on helpful content stresses showing who created the content and their first-hand experience.
• Your Google Business Profile, complete and current: categories, services, area, hours, photos, and replies to reviews. Google says local results depend on relevance, distance and prominence, and that prominence reflects how many sites link to you and how many reviews you have.
• Consistent listings on the directories that matter in your industry and city: same name, address, phone and service description everywhere.
• Mentions on other sites: a local news story, a supplier's case study, an industry association directory, a guest article. These take time to earn and are the hardest part to fake, which is why they carry weight.
• Reviews that describe the job ("they replaced our roof in two days in March"), which you get by asking every customer, not by scripting them.

Structured data

Add schema markup for your business type, services and FAQs if your site supports it, but only for information that is visible on the page. Google says no special schema is needed for AI features, and markup that contradicts the page does more harm than good.

A test you can run today

This takes about twenty minutes and gives you a baseline.

1. Write ten questions a real customer might ask, in their words. Mix general ones ("best accountant for small business in Kingston") and specific ones ("which accountant in Kingston handles cross-border taxes for freelancers?"). Include questions in French if you serve French-speaking clients.
2. Ask each question in ChatGPT (with search enabled), in Perplexity and in Google (look at the AI Overview or AI Mode answer if one appears). Use a private browser window so your history doesn't skew the results.
3. Record three things for each answer: whether your business is named, which competitors are named, and which sources are cited.
4. Look at the cited sources. They show you what these tools trust in your market: a directory, a review site, a competitor's service page, a local article. That list is your to-do list.
5. Repeat monthly with the same questions. AI answers vary from one run to the next, so look at the trend over several months, not one result.

In Google Analytics, also check the referral traffic report for visits from chatgpt.com and perplexity.ai. The numbers are usually small, but they show whether people who see you in an answer click through.

What not to do

• Don't pay for "AI SEO" packages that promise placement. No one controls what these tools say. The same answer changes from day to day.
• Don't mass-produce AI-written pages for every city and keyword. Google's guidance on helpful content warns against content made mainly to attract search traffic and against summarizing others without adding value. Thin pages rarely get cited.
• Don't block every bot in a panic. Blocking training crawlers is a reasonable choice. Blocking search crawlers removes you from the answers.
• Don't neglect regular search. AI answers are built on top of search results. A site that doesn't rank or isn't indexed has little chance of being cited.

How long it takes

Fixing access issues (robots.txt, a firewall setting) can take effect within days. Rewriting service pages takes a few weeks to be recrawled and reflected. Earning mentions and reviews takes months. Plan this as an ongoing part of your marketing, not a one-time project.

Where PNE fits

This work sits inside PNE's digital marketing service: we audit what crawlers can reach, rewrite service pages so they answer real questions, clean up your Google Business Profile and listings, and run the monthly AI answer test with you so you can see what changes. If your site itself is the bottleneck, our website design service builds sites with this structure from the start.

Sources

• AI features and your website — Google Search Central
• Overview of OpenAI crawlers — OpenAI
• Perplexity crawlers — Perplexity
• Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content — Google Search Central
• Tips to improve your local ranking on Google — Google Business Profile Help