How to show up when customers ask ChatGPT.

Someone asks ChatGPT, “Who’s a good bookkeeper for a small building company in Sydney?” They get one short answer and three names. They don’t scroll. They don’t open ten tabs. If you’re not one of the three, you didn’t lose the sale. You never got a look at it.

That’s the shift. This article covers how AI tools decide who to mention, what’s worth your time, and four fixes you can make this month without buying anything.

What’s changing

Search used to hand people ten links and let them decide. AI search does the first round of deciding for them. It reads what’s out there about a business, checks whether the sources agree, and names the businesses it can describe with confidence.

Two things follow.

• Clarity beats cleverness. An AI tool can only recommend what it can explain. If your site says “we craft bespoke solutions that elevate brands”, it has nothing to repeat. If it says “we do BAS, payroll and monthly reporting for Sydney tradies, for a flat monthly fee”, it does.
• It reads more than your website. Answers draw on directories, reviews, articles and other people’s sites. What others say about you matters, and it needs to match what you say about yourself.

Skip the tricks

Google has said that showing up in its AI Overviews and AI Mode comes down to the same basics as normal SEO: helpful, original content that Google can crawl and index. It specifically says you don’t need an llms.txt file, special markup, or pages rewritten for AI. If someone pitches you a secret AI formula, ask them to show you where Google or OpenAI says it works.

What does matter is simpler, and it’s all below.

Four fixes for this month

1. Say what you do plainly

Open your homepage cold. In five seconds, could a stranger tell who you help, what you do and where you work? Write one sentence that does that job and put it at the top of your homepage and every service page.

We help [who] with [what], so they can [outcome]. Based in [place].

Then go through your service pages and swap buzzwords for nouns. Name each service the way a customer would search for it, and give each one its own page. One page listing eight services gives an AI tool nothing specific to quote.

2. Answer the questions customers actually ask

List the last ten questions people asked before they hired you. Pull them from emails, sales calls, DMs and reviews. Each one is a page or a section on a page.

A few rules that make an answer easy to quote:

• Answer in the first two sentences. Then add detail.
• Be specific. Who it’s for, who it isn’t for, a realistic price range or timeframe, and what happens next.
• Put a real name on it. An author with a role and a short bio is more believable than “the team”.
• Keep it short. One question, one page, a few hundred words.

For example, “How much does a website cost?” and “How long does a rebrand take?” are better pages than “Our approach”. Most businesses hide their numbers. A clear range builds trust with people and gives AI something concrete to repeat.

3. Keep your details consistent

Your business name, address, phone number, what you do and who you serve should read the same everywhere. That means your website footer, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, Facebook, industry association listings and any directories you’re on.

Small differences add up. “Smith & Co”, “Smith and Co” and “Smith & Co Accounting” can look like different businesses to a machine. Write one short description (about 25 words) and one longer one, then paste them everywhere. Fix old listings rather than adding new ones.

4. Earn mentions from credible places

Because AI answers draw on more than your own site, being talked about in the right places helps. Start with the easy ones:

• Clients. Ask happy clients for a Google review that says what you did for them in a sentence or two. Specific reviews beat five stars with no words.
• Case studies on their sites. A credit or a link from a client’s website is a real signal.
• Industry bodies and directories. Make sure every listing you’re entitled to is complete and current.
• Trade press, podcasts and events. Offer a short comment on something changing in your industry. One quoted line in the right publication is worth more than ten posts on your own blog.

Don’t buy mentions. Google lists chasing inauthentic brand mentions as something to skip, and they don’t convince anyone anyway.

Check the doors are open

Before any of the above can work, the AI tools need to be able to read your site. Ask whoever manages your website to check two things. It takes about ten minutes.

1. Your robots.txt file. ChatGPT’s search feature uses a crawler called OAI-SearchBot. OpenAI says sites that opt out of it won’t be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though they can still appear as plain links. OpenAI’s separate crawler, GPTBot, is for training its models. The two are independent, so you can stay out of training and still be findable. For example:

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

Whether to block GPTBot is your call. Just make sure a broad rule meant for scrapers hasn’t blocked everything by accident.

2. Your firewall and security tools. Some security plugins and CDNs block unknown bots even when robots.txt says yes. Ask your developer or host to confirm that OAI-SearchBot and Googlebot can reach your pages.

For Google, the basics apply as always. Pages should be indexable, important content should be in text (not locked in images), and if you use structured data it needs to match what’s visible on the page.

Test it in 20 minutes

Write ten questions a customer would ask. Mix two types: questions that name you (“Is [your business] any good?”) and questions that don’t (“best [what you do] for [who] in [place]”). Ask each one in ChatGPT, Gemini and Google, then record what you see.

The sources column is the useful one. It shows you where the AI is looking, so it tells you where to earn a mention next. Repeat monthly. Answers vary by person and by day, so watch the trend, not any single result.

What to expect

Nobody can guarantee a mention, and anyone who does is guessing. Do the four fixes, check the doors, then keep going. The good news is that everything here also makes your website clearer for people and better for Google.

Want a second pair of eyes?

Bring your ten questions to a 30 minute strategy call. We’ll look at where you show up, where you don’t, and what to fix first. Book a strategy call. You can also see how we help with marketing and websites, or read why your ads stopped working for the tracking and landing page checks.