How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT and Google's AI answers

Two details in OpenAI's own help pages decide where to start. ChatGPT's search crawler is OAI-SearchBot, and a site that blocks it is left out of ChatGPT's search answers; GPTBot is a separate crawler used for model training, so you can refuse training and still be found. And ChatGPT search sometimes rewrites a question into queries it sends to partner search providers, of which the privacy policies it links are Microsoft's and Shopify's. For a service business that makes Bing's index matter as much as Google's.^[3][1]

The third step does most of the work. When we audited which pages the engines cite for service questions, the ones they chose spelled out the exact job, named the tools, walked through an example and often gave a price. Pages that described a business in general terms were rarely the ones quoted. Measuring the result is simpler than most people expect, because ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to the links it sends, so those visits appear in Google Analytics under their own source.^[2]

Google's guidance on what helps is short. Write content that is not a commodity: a first-hand view, real experience and detail that others cannot copy from each other. Organise it with clear headings, support it with good images or video, keep your Merchant Center and Business Profile details current, and make sure the page is crawlable, fast and not duplicated elsewhere on the site. Google also notes that AI Overviews only appear when they add something to the results, so many searches never show one.^[4][9]

Just as useful is Google's list of things you can ignore for its search: llms.txt and other special AI files, breaking content into tiny chunks, rewriting pages just for AI, chasing inauthentic mentions, and special structured data. Structured data still earns rich results, so keep it, but Google says no schema is needed for AI features.^[4]

Search Console is where to see the result: Google counts clicks from AI Overviews and AI Mode in the Performance report under the Web search type, and its guide points to a Generative AI performance report for AI features. Google also warns that no third-party tool has access to its internal ranking or AI systems, whatever the tool claims.^[9][4]

Bing now shows the AI side directly: its AI Performance report in Webmaster Tools counts how often your pages are cited in Copilot and Bing's AI summaries, which pages, and the phrases the AI searched with when it found them. Bing also recommends IndexNow so AI answers draw on the current version of a page.^[11]

Our own measurement works the way a buyer searches. We keep a fixed set of real buyer questions, chosen by search volume in the UK and the US, and ask every one of them each month on six engines: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode. Each answer is scored for whether the business is named, whether its site is cited and who is recommended instead. The questions stay fixed, so one month compares with the next, and because a single run can differ from the next, we read the trend rather than any one answer.

Which should you invest in? The same work serves both, so the question is really one of emphasis: pages that answer buyers concretely, a technically sound site that Google and Bing both index, and facts about you that agree everywhere. Our AI SEO service does that work as part of our one managed marketing service, and our comparison of AI SEO and traditional SEO goes further into the differences. The search volumes below show where attention is: people look up AI Overviews far more than they ask how to rank in ChatGPT.