How to get your business found in AI search.

What actually changed with AI search

Here is the short version. People now use AI search to ask for recommendations the way they used to ask a neighbor, so if ChatGPT or Google's AI does not name your business, that customer never hears about you. Getting named is mostly clear, specific writing and genuine reviews. Most of the rest is hype, and this guide gives you enough to tell the difference.

Picture a parent who just moved to Park City. A year ago they Googled "best daycare near me" and scrolled a list of links. Today they open ChatGPT, or Google's AI answer, and ask, "What is a good daycare in Park City for a 3-year-old?" The AI replies in a short paragraph and names two or three places.

If you are one of those places, you probably just won a family. If you are not, you were never in the running. They did not scroll past you. They never saw you at all.

That is the whole shift. The people who find you this way often arrive ready to buy, because the AI already vouched for you. There is a clunky industry term for it, Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO. Ignore the jargon. It just means being the business the AI recommends. (For why the assistant is becoming the front door at all, see our piece on the agent as the new operating system.)

How does AI decide who to recommend?

Think of the AI as an extremely well-read friend. When you ask that friend for a recommendation, they do not re-read the entire internet on the spot. They answer from what they have already absorbed about the world, plus a quick look around. They tend to name the businesses that are easy to understand, easy to quote, and widely talked about. That is the entire secret, and it comes down to three things.

One. The AI can tell exactly what you do. It cannot recommend what it cannot understand. A website that says "elevating childhood experiences" tells it nothing. A website that says "full-day and half-day care for ages 6 weeks to 5 years in Park City, starting at $1,250 a month" tells it everything. Plain and specific beats clever and vague, every time.

Two. You are easy to quote. The AI loves to grab a clear answer and repeat it. A page that directly answers a real question ("Do you offer half days? Yes, half-day spots run from 8 a.m. to noon") hands it something to lift. A wall of marketing fluff gives it nothing to work with.

Three. Other people talk about you. The AI leans heavily on what the wider web says about you, like reviews, local articles, real directories, and mentions on other sites. If you exist only on your own website, you look smaller than a business that people actually discuss.

Here is the part that matters most, because it explains a lot of the nonsense you will hear. The AI is not reading your whole website fresh every time someone asks. It works mostly from what it has already taken in. So being consistently and widely described is what counts, and nobody can flip a switch to make the AI re-read you on demand.

The honest truth most people selling this will not tell you

The AI is not consistent. Ask it the same question twice and you can get different businesses each time. One real study tracked a brand that the AI named in 86 percent of its answers one month, then in just 14 percent the next. Same brand, same question.

Sit with that for a second, because three honest conclusions fall right out of it.

• Nobody can guarantee the AI will mention you. Anyone who promises a guaranteed result is guessing.
• Nobody can track "every time AI mentions you." There is no list to pull. The best anyone can do is ask the AI a set of sample questions and see how often you come up. That is a useful estimate, not an exact count, and anyone showing you a precise number is dressing up a sample as a fact.
• Nobody can "fix it in hours." No one controls when or whether the AI takes another look at your site. The realistic timeline is days to weeks, with no guarantee.

You will also see tools that sell "AI visibility tracking," and it helps to know exactly what they do, because it is simpler than the pitch makes it sound. You hand them a set of questions your customers might ask. They run those questions across the engines on a schedule, usually once a day. Then they show you the trend, how often you get named, how you stack up against competitors, and which sources the AI leaned on. That is the whole product.

It is a useful scoreboard, and watching the trend is the right way to read these monthly swings. Just be clear on what you are buying. None of this means GEO is fake. It means the honest version looks calmer and less magical than the sales pitch.

What works on your own website

Almost everything that moves the needle here is writing, not software. This is not just our opinion. When researchers ran ten thousand test questions to see what got quoted, the winners were pages with specific facts and real numbers. The old keyword-stuffing tricks did nothing, or actively hurt.

Here is the real playbook. Most of it is a weekend of work.

• Answer the questions customers actually ask, right on your pages. Hours, ages, prices, what makes you different, how to get started. Write the question as a heading, then answer it plainly in the first sentence underneath. Keep each answer short enough to stand on its own.
• Put real specifics on the page. "Tuition starts at $1,250 a month" beats "affordable rates." "Open 7 a.m. to 6 p.m." beats "convenient hours." Numbers and plain facts are exactly what the AI grabs and repeats.
• Check now and then, but do not obsess. Once a month, ask the major AIs your top few customer questions and see if you come up. Watch the direction over time. Do not panic over a single bad week, because that is just how the AI behaves.

What works off your website, and for a local business it matters more

Here is the part most "website optimization" pitches quietly skip. The AI does not mostly quote your website. It quotes the places where people talk about you, like reviews, community threads, YouTube, and directories. And ranking number one on Google no longer guarantees a citation either. Even inside Google's own AI answers, the share of citations that also rank in Google's top ten fell from about 76 percent to 38 percent in a single year. ChatGPT and Perplexity go further still, because they do not use Google's rankings at all.

For a local business, a few specific things carry most of the weight.

• Your Google Business Profile is the foundation. When someone asks Google's AI for "a good daycare in Park City," the answer leans heavily on Google Business Profiles. It carries your hours, services, categories, and reviews. Complete, accurate, active profiles show up far more often than thin ones, by a wide margin. Fill in every field. Keep your hours correct. Add real photos. This is free, and for local questions it is the single highest-value thing you can do.
• Reviews are not just for humans anymore. The AI reads them and quotes them, sometimes word for word, like "according to reviews, this place is known for." Reviews that mention what you actually do ("the half-day program was perfect for our toddler") teach the AI what you offer. So ask happy customers for reviews and make it easy. You cannot script them, and you should not try.
• Get mentioned where the AI already looks. Real local directories, "best of" roundups from local sites, the city or parenting forum where people ask for recommendations, a short video if it suits your business. You do not need to be everywhere. You need to genuinely show up where people in your area actually ask.
• Keep your name, address, and phone number identical everywhere. On your site, your Google profile, Yelp, Facebook, every directory. The AI cross-checks these to confirm you are one real business. If three listings spell your name three different ways, you look like three shaky businesses instead of one solid one.

The technical setup that genuinely helps

Most of what wins is writing. But underneath your words is a layer of technical plumbing that makes them legible to machines. You do not have to build it. You do need to know it exists, so you can ask your web person for it and tell whether they delivered. Here is what actually matters, in plain terms.

• Schema markup, and making sure machines can read your page. Schema is code that labels your facts for machines, flagging this as a business, these as the hours, and this as a review. Engines use it, some more than others. Google and Bing parse it and lean on it to understand you, while ChatGPT and Perplexity mostly work from the plain words on your page. Either way, schema does not guarantee a citation. When researchers added it and measured, citations barely moved. What it does is help engines understand you correctly, confirming your name, location, and hours, tying your profiles together with sameAs links, and keeping you eligible for richer normal-search listings. There is one rule. It has to match what a visitor actually sees. It is a clean label for real content, not a patch for bad writing. Where it matters most is a graphical, effects-heavy site. Most AI crawlers do not run a site's fancy effects, so if your content only loads after them, the crawler sees a blank page. Your real content has to be in the raw code, and schema is the part most likely to survive there, as long as it is built in and not loaded by the same effects.
• The "this is all me" links. A small piece of schema called sameAs connects your website to your Google Business Profile, Yelp, Facebook, and directory listings. It tells the AI that all of those are the same real business, not a scatter of unrelated pages. Ask your web person, "Are my Google, Yelp, and Facebook profiles linked to my site with sameAs?"
• FAQ schema, but only for real questions. If your page answers questions customers genuinely ask, marking them up as FAQ schema helps. It mirrors your visible Q and A in clean, machine-readable form. The key word is genuine. Google recently retired the old FAQ search feature precisely because people stuffed fake questions onto pages to game it, though it still reads the markup to understand a page. Use it where the questions are real and shown on the page. Skip it everywhere else.
• Clean structure. Real headings, in order, each section focused on one clear thing. This works whether your site is many pages or a single landing page split into clean sections. Put questions as headings with the answer right beneath. It helps the AI find and lift your answers, and it makes the page better for humans too.

So why would a tool charge every month? The honest answer is visibility, not a guarantee. Watching that scoreboard over time, plus which AI bots are actually crawling your site, is real ongoing work, the way Google Analytics became part of SEO, and it can be worth paying for. A crawler has to read you before it can cite you, so a rising crawl count is a leading indicator worth watching.

That kind of monitoring is also something a capable developer can often build for you once, rather than rent forever. What is never worth it is a guarantee, a precise citation count, or a robot rewriting your site on its own. The whole skill is telling real visibility from a sales story.

Watch for these magic words

When someone pitches you "AI optimization," hold their claims up against this list. These are the phrases that signal a sales story running ahead of the truth.

• "We track every time AI mentions you." Nobody can. They sample. Ask how many questions they check and how often.
• "We will get you indexed in hours." Made up. No one controls the AI's schedule.
• "Just add this special file and the AI will cite you." This usually means a file called llms.txt. Google itself published that this file does nothing for its search results. It has a real but narrow technical use behind the scenes. It is not a shortcut to getting recommended.
• "Our AI automatically rewrites your website to keep it optimized." Be careful. Software publishing to your live site with no human checking is how your brand voice turns to mush, or worse, how something inaccurate ends up on your page. The trustworthy version always has a person approve each change.
• "Add our schema and the AI will love you." Schema is worth having, but it is not a magic switch. The best 2026 evidence shows that adding it does not reliably move AI citations on any engine. Set it up once for the real benefits above. Do not pay ongoing premium fees for schema sold as an "AI" lever.
• "It is all about optimizing your website." Your website is only part of the picture, and for a local business, often the smaller part. If a pitch never mentions your reviews, your Google profile, or the places your customers actually look, they are selling you half a solution.

Six questions to ask before you pay anyone

You do not need to be technical to avoid getting fooled. You need these six questions, and you need to watch how a vendor or developer answers them. The right answers prove they understand how AI search actually works. A slick dodge or a big promise tells you they are selling a story.

1. "Can you guarantee I will show up in ChatGPT or Google's AI answers?" The only honest answer is no. The same question returns different businesses from one month to the next, so no one controls who gets named. Anyone who guarantees placement is either bluffing or does not understand how unstable these answers are.
2. "Are you sampling a set of questions, and do you show me the trend over time?" No tool sees every AI answer, so the honest ones sample on a schedule and track how you move over time. Ask how many questions and how often. "We track every mention" is impossible, and a one-time snapshot ignores how much these answers swing from month to month.
3. "Will adding schema get me cited by the AI?" A vendor who knows the evidence says no, not reliably. Schema helps Google and Bing understand you and ties your profiles together, but ChatGPT and Perplexity mostly read your plain words, and adding schema does not move AI citations on its own. Anyone selling schema as the "AI" switch is behind the research.
4. "Beyond my website, what is your plan for my Google profile, reviews, and the places customers actually look?" Only about a third of AI answers come from the top of Google, so a plan that lives entirely on your website is half a plan. If they have no real answer here, they do not understand where AI answers come from.
5. "When you find something to change, does a person approve it before it goes live?" You want a person. Software publishing to your live site unattended is how your brand voice turns to mush, or how something inaccurate ends up on your page. A confident "our AI just handles it" is a flag, not a feature.
6. "What are you doing that I could not do myself with clear writing and good reviews?" The honest answer is "save you time and keep a steady eye on the trend," which is worth paying for. Promises of guarantees, instant indexing, or control over the AI are not. The grander the claim, the bigger the flag.

That last question is the entire point. The basics are cheap, and they last. Paying a good person to do them well and consistently is reasonable. Paying for magic is not.

The one thing to remember

You do not need to understand the technology to avoid getting fooled. You need one idea. The thing that gets the AI to recommend your business is the same thing that earns a human's trust. Be clear about what you do. Be specific. Be genuinely good. And get people talking about you.

We do this work for businesses, helping them get found in AI search. The most valuable thing we bring is not a promise to put you in every answer, because no one can make that promise. It is an honest read on where you stand, the unglamorous setup done right, and the discipline to skip the rest. Do that, and you will not need the magic. Skip it, and no amount of magic will save you.

Frequently asked questions

What is GEO, or Generative Engine Optimization?

GEO is the practice of getting your business named and cited by AI assistants like ChatGPT, Google AI, and Perplexity when people ask them for recommendations. In plain terms, it means being the business the AI recommends. The fundamentals are clear, specific writing, genuine reviews, and being talked about across the web.

What is the single most important thing a local business can do?

Fully complete your Google Business Profile and earn genuine, recent reviews. That feeds the AI more than anything on your own website. After that, answer your customers' real questions in plain, specific words on your site.

Do I have to pay for an AI SEO tool?

No. The fundamentals are mostly clear writing and genuine reviews, which you can do yourself. A tool can save you time and watch your results for you over time, which is worth paying for. Be skeptical of anything it promises beyond that.

Can anyone guarantee the AI will recommend my business?

No. The AI changes which businesses it names from week to week, so guarantees are not possible. Anyone offering one is guessing, or does not understand how unstable these answers are.

Does adding schema markup help my business get cited by AI?

Not on its own. Google and Bing use schema to understand your site, but ChatGPT and Perplexity mostly read your plain words, and the best 2026 evidence shows adding schema does not reliably move AI citations. Set it up once for clarity and richer search listings, not as a magic switch.

How often do AI search results change?

Often. The set of businesses an AI names can swing 40 to 60 percent from one month to the next, and the same question can return different businesses on different days. The honest approach is watching the trend over time, not chasing a single result.