Something has shifted in the way people search for businesses, and it has happened faster than almost anyone predicted. A growing percentage of customers — particularly younger ones, but increasingly everyone — no longer type their queries into Google. They ask ChatGPT. They ask Perplexity. They use Google's own AI Overviews. They have a conversation with Gemini. And the AI, in each case, answers with specific business names, descriptions, and recommendations.
The question that follows is, naturally, the urgent one: how does the AI decide which businesses to mention? And — more practically — what can you do to make sure yours is one of them?
The short answer is that each platform works a little differently, and each requires its own set of actions. The longer answer is what follows. This is the platform-by-platform guide we wish had existed when we started helping small businesses navigate this transition.
First, the universal foundation
Before we get into the specifics for each platform, there are a few things that matter for every AI search engine. Think of these as the foundation on which everything else rests.
Structured data on your website. This is, without doubt, the single most important technical step. Schema.org markup tells AI systems what your page actually is — a LocalBusiness, a Service, a Product, a Person, an Article. Without it, your page is just words on a screen. With it, it is a structured entity that AI can confidently cite. If you do nothing else from this article, add LocalBusiness or Organization schema to your website.
A clear, factual "About" page. AI systems love unambiguous facts. Who you are, what you do, where you are located, when you were founded, who runs the business, what makes you different. Write this in plain, declarative sentences. Avoid marketing fluff. The AI is not impressed by adjectives — it is looking for facts it can cite.
Mentions across the wider web. AI systems do not just read your website. They read everything that mentions you — directories, news articles, industry publications, review sites, social media, forums. The more places you are mentioned in a consistent and credible way, the more confident the AI becomes that you are a real, legitimate business worth recommending. This is sometimes called "entity confidence," and it matters enormously.
Reviews, reviews, reviews. Real reviews from real customers, on platforms the AI engines actually read — Google, Yelp, Trustpilot, industry-specific sites. Quantity matters somewhat. Quality and recency matter more. A business with forty thoughtful five-star reviews from the last six months will, naturally, be cited more often than one with two hundred reviews from 2019.
With those foundations in place, let us go platform by platform.
ChatGPT
ChatGPT is, in many ways, the most influential of the AI search engines simply because of its scale. Hundreds of millions of people use it weekly, and a meaningful percentage of those queries are now commercial in nature — "best dentist in [city]", "where should I get my car fixed", "good restaurants near me for an anniversary dinner."
When ChatGPT answers these questions, where does it get its information from?
Two main sources. The first is its training data, which includes a vast snapshot of the public web from before its knowledge cutoff. The second, and increasingly more important, is real-time web browsing — ChatGPT now reaches out to live websites for current information, much like a human researcher would.
To increase your chances of being cited by ChatGPT:
Make sure you are mentioned in authoritative third-party sources. ChatGPT trusts sources that are themselves trustworthy. Industry publications, local newspapers, well-regarded directories, established review platforms. A single mention in a respected local paper is worth, in our experience, dozens of mentions in low-quality directories.
Optimize for SearchGPT specifically. ChatGPT's web browsing capability — sometimes called SearchGPT — uses a specific user agent (OAI-SearchBot) and pulls live content. Make sure your robots.txt does not block it. Make sure your important pages are accessible and load quickly. Make sure your content is structured cleanly enough that an AI can parse it without getting confused.
Write content that directly answers questions. ChatGPT loves to cite sources that answer the user's question concisely. If your content meanders for six paragraphs before getting to the point, the AI will move on to a competitor who got to the point in two sentences.
Claim your presence in OpenAI's tooling where possible. OpenAI is, gradually, building more direct ways for businesses to provide structured information about themselves. Watch this space — and participate when the opportunity arises.
Perplexity
Perplexity is the AI search engine most loved by serious researchers and increasingly by professionals making purchasing decisions. It is also, in our view, the most transparent — every answer comes with citations to the sources it used, which means you can see exactly which sites are winning the Perplexity game and which are not.
Perplexity behaves more like a traditional search engine than ChatGPT does. It crawls the web in real time, ranks sources by relevance and authority, and synthesizes an answer from the top sources. This makes it, in some ways, easier to optimize for — many traditional SEO best practices apply directly.
To be cited by Perplexity:
Rank well in traditional search. Perplexity's source selection correlates strongly with traditional search rankings. If you are on page one of Google for a query, you are dramatically more likely to be cited by Perplexity for that same query. The fundamentals matter.
Provide clear, sourced, authoritative content. Perplexity favors content that itself cites sources, presents information clearly, and demonstrates expertise. Long-form content with proper structure tends to outperform thin pages.
Make sure your domain has clean technical signals. HTTPS, mobile-friendly, fast loading, no broken links. Perplexity, more than any other AI engine in our testing, seems to penalize technically broken sites.
Test Perplexity directly. Type the questions your customers would ask. See who gets cited. Study what they have in common. This is the most direct competitive intelligence you can do, and it is free.
Google AI Overviews
For most small businesses, Google AI Overviews are the most consequential of the AI search experiences — simply because Google still drives the majority of search traffic in most markets. When an AI Overview appears at the top of the results page, it can dramatically reshape who gets clicks and who gets cited.
Google AI Overviews draw their information from Google's search index, with a particular preference for sources that are already ranking well, that have strong E-E-A-T signals (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness), and that have clear, factual content structured in ways the AI can parse easily.
To increase your chances of being cited in AI Overviews:
Add FAQ schema to your service pages. Google's AI loves structured Q&A content. A well-organized FAQ section with proper schema markup is, in our experience, one of the highest-leverage things a small business can do for AI Overview visibility.
Optimize for featured snippets. The patterns that win featured snippets — clear question-and-answer formatting, concise direct answers, structured lists, well-organized headings — also tend to win AI Overview citations. The two are closely related.
Build topical authority, not just individual page authority. Google's AI is increasingly looking at whether a domain is broadly trusted on a topic, not just whether one specific page is good. A site with twenty interconnected pages on dental implants will be trusted more than one with a single page, even if the individual pages are similar in quality.
Strengthen your Google Business Profile. For local queries, AI Overviews lean heavily on Google Business Profile data. A well-maintained profile with complete information, recent posts, and active reviews is essentially mandatory.
Gemini
Google Gemini — the consumer-facing AI assistant — overlaps significantly with Google AI Overviews but has its own quirks. It is more conversational, more willing to give opinions, and somewhat more aggressive about recommending specific businesses by name when asked.
Most of the same advice applies: structured data, clear factual content, strong Google Business Profile, real reviews, mentions across the wider web. The one additional thing worth noting is that Gemini, in our testing, places unusual weight on what we would call "narrative coherence." It seems to favor businesses that tell a clear, consistent story about who they are and what they do, across all the places they appear online.
If your website says one thing, your Google Business Profile says another, your Yelp listing says a third, and your LinkedIn says a fourth, Gemini gets confused — and confused AI engines do not recommend you. Consistency is, alla fine, more important than cleverness.
The mistakes to avoid
A few honest warnings before we close.
Do not try to manipulate AI engines with hidden text or prompt injection. It does not work, and when it is detected — and it will be — the consequences are severe.
Do not rely on a single platform. The AI search landscape is changing too fast. The platform that drives 30% of your inquiries this year might be replaced by something new next year. Build a foundation that serves all of them.
Do not assume traditional SEO is dead. It is not. Strong traditional SEO is still the foundation on which AI search visibility is built. Skip it at your peril.
Do not pay for "AI listing services" that promise to submit you to ChatGPT. ChatGPT does not have a submission form. Anyone selling you one is selling you nothing.
Where to start
If this all feels like a lot, that is because it is. The honest truth is that AI search optimization in 2026 is more complex than traditional SEO ever was, because there are more platforms, more variables, and less established best practice. Nobody has all the answers.
But the starting point is, at least, clear. Audit your website. See where the foundations are missing. Fix them in priority order. Then iterate.
You can run a free audit of your site's AI search readiness at /seo-standings — we built it specifically to evaluate the things that matter for ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, and Gemini, not just traditional Google rankings. It takes about ninety seconds and will tell you, in plain language, what to fix first.
In the end, the businesses that get listed in AI search are the ones that have done the unglamorous foundational work that everyone else is putting off. Naturally, this is good news — because the bar is, for now, surprisingly low. The opportunity is yours to take.