AI SEO means making your business easy for tools such as ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews and Microsoft Copilot to find, understand and cite when someone asks a question you can answer. For a local business, most of it is ordinary SEO done well. Google itself says there are no additional requirements or special optimisations needed to appear in its AI features.
What changes is how people reach you. An AI answer may name your business without sending a click, or send a visitor who has already made up their mind. This guide covers how the main AI tools choose their sources, what to fix first and how to tell whether AI answers are sending you customers.
What AI SEO is, and how it relates to GEO
You will also see it called generative engine optimisation (GEO), answer engine optimisation or ChatGPT SEO. The names differ, but the aim is the same: be a source an AI tool can rely on, and give it facts about your business that are easy to repeat accurately.
It isn't a replacement for SEO. Google only links to pages in its AI answers that are already indexed for Google Search, ChatGPT finds websites through OpenAI's own search crawler, and Microsoft reports Copilot citations through Bing Webmaster Tools. If search engines can't crawl and understand your website, AI tools have very little to work with.
How Google's AI Overviews choose their sources
According to Google's guidance on AI features, a page must be indexed and eligible to appear in Google Search with a snippet. Only then can it be shown as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and beyond that, Google points site owners back to the usual SEO basics.
- Allow search engines to crawl the site in your robots.txt file.
- Make important pages easy to find through internal links.
- Keep important content in text form, supported by images and video.
- Give visitors a good experience on the page.
- Make sure any structured data matches what the page visibly says.
Traffic from AI Overviews and AI Mode is counted in the Performance report in Google Search Console, within the Web search type, rather than in a report of its own.
How to rank in ChatGPT answers
OpenAI's documentation on its crawlers says OAI-SearchBot is the crawler used to surface websites in ChatGPT's search features, and it recommends allowing OAI-SearchBot in your robots.txt file. GPTBot is a separate crawler that collects content which may be used to train OpenAI's models, so you can block training and still be found in ChatGPT search.
Once the crawler can reach you, clear answers matter most. In Bing's announcement of its AI Performance report, Microsoft advises giving content a clear structure, with headings, tables and FAQ sections, and keeping it fresh and accurate. That is sensible advice for any AI tool, and for the people reading your site too.
What a local business should do first
- Check that nothing blocks the crawlers. Look at your robots.txt file, and ask whoever manages your hosting or security settings whether search or AI crawlers are being turned away. On our own site, robots.txt lets every crawler in apart from the admin and API paths.
- Get your Google Business Profile right. Your name, category, hours, services and service area should match your website exactly. Our Google Business Profile setup guide walks through each part.
- Answer questions in plain text. Each service page should say what you do, where you do it and who it's for in its opening lines. Write out your areas, opening hours and prices instead of leaving them in images or PDFs.
- Collect reviews that mention the job. A review that says what was done and where gives readers and AI tools far more to go on than a star rating alone. Our guide on how to get more Google reviews covers a simple way to ask.
- Add structured data that matches the page. Mark up your business details, services and FAQs, and keep the markup in line with the visible text, as Google asks. Our guide to structured data for small business websites explains the basics, and each guide on our own site carries markup describing the article and its author.
- Keep your facts consistent everywhere. Your business name, address, phone number and services should read the same on your website, your Google profile and every directory you're listed in.
How to tell whether AI answers send you customers
- Google Search Console includes AI Overview and AI Mode traffic in its Performance report, within Web search.
- Bing Webmaster Tools has an AI Performance report showing how often your pages are cited as sources in Microsoft Copilot and Bing's AI summaries, and which pages are cited.
- Your analytics can show visits referred from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and similar sites.
- Your enquiry forms can record where each visitor first came from, and a "How did you hear about us?" question catches the rest.
When we rebuilt the website for City Post Express, a Connecticut shipping company, we set it up to record the first and most recent way each visitor arrived. In the first twelve weeks of its Google Ads programme, around one in five of its 321 quote and contact requests came from people who had arrived from ChatGPT. Tracing every request to its source is what made that visible.
AI SEO questions
Do I need a separate AI SEO service?
For most local businesses, no. The effort that helps AI tools find and trust you is the same effort that helps you rank, from a site search engines can crawl to an accurate Google Business Profile and real reviews. If you'd rather hand it over, our SEO services cover the technical fixes, content and local SEO described in this guide.
Should I block AI crawlers?
That depends on what you want. OpenAI says sites that want to appear in ChatGPT's search results should allow OAI-SearchBot, while GPTBot, which collects training content, is controlled separately. A business that wants to be found will usually allow the search crawlers.
How long does it take to show up in AI answers?
Nobody can promise a timeline. Once your pages are crawled and indexed they become eligible, and whether they're chosen depends on how well they answer the question compared with other sources.
If you'd like us to check whether your website is open to AI crawlers and how it shows up on Google, book a free website audit on a 20-minute call.