How to get found by ChatGPT and AI search: what a small business can actually do

Someone you've never met asks ChatGPT for a recommendation. A plumber, an accountant, a wedding photographer, a decent café for a team lunch. The tool answers in a few lines. You're either in that answer or you're not.

So what can you do about it? Less than the hype suggests, and more than nothing.

Nobody can guarantee you a mention. Not an agency, and certainly not the person selling a course on LinkedIn. These tools are new, they change, and the companies running them don't publish a formula you can follow to the letter.

That's the bad news. The good news is that the practical steps are mostly dull, familiar and within your reach. You don't need a new budget line. You need a sound website, a few well-written pages and a bit of patience.

You'll see the labels floating about: answer engine optimisation (AEO) and generative engine optimisation (GEO). Others use these labels for the work of being found in AI answers. For a small business, it's mostly good ordinary SEO. Same foundations, applied with a bit more care. If you want a handy phrase for it, chatgpt seo will do, as long as you remember it isn't a separate discipline with secret levers.

These apply whether a customer is typing into Google or asking a chatbot. Work through them in order.

1. Be indexed. If search engines haven't found and stored your pages, nothing else matters.
2. Allow crawling. Check your robots.txt file, and check that any CDN or hosting setup isn't blocking visitors it shouldn't. Google lists this as worthwhile, and it is easy to get wrong without noticing.
3. Put important content in text. Prices, services, areas covered, opening hours. If it only exists inside an image or a PDF scan, treat it as missing.
4. Give every service its own clear page. One page for boiler servicing, another for emergency call-outs. Not one vague page that tries to cover everything.
5. Keep your business profile accurate. That means your Google Business Profile, and your Merchant Center details if you sell products. Google specifically lists keeping these up to date.
6. Link your pages together. Internal links make content findable. A service page nobody links to is a service page nobody finds.
7. Look after page experience. Pages that load properly and read easily on a phone. Nothing exotic.

If you use structured data, make sure it matches what's visible on the page. That's the only rule. Don't mark up things a visitor can't see.

That list, by the way, is why this isn't a mystery. Google says the best practices for SEO remain relevant for its AI features, such as AI Overviews and AI Mode. There are no additional requirements to appear in them, and no other special optimisations necessary.

Here's the one genuinely specific thing.

OpenAI uses a crawler called OAI-SearchBot to surface websites in the search features inside ChatGPT. If your site opts out of it, you won't be shown in ChatGPT search answers. You can still appear as a navigational link, but that's a thin consolation. OpenAI recommends allowing OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt.

So open your robots.txt file (it's usually at yourwebsite.co.uk/robots.txt) and look for any rules that mention OAI-SearchBot. If you find a disallow, ask whoever built the site why it's there. Sometimes it's deliberate. Often it's inherited from a template or a plugin nobody remembers installing.

There's a separate crawler called GPTBot, and it's a different setting. A site can allow OAI-SearchBot and disallow GPTBot. That tells OpenAI your content shouldn't be used to train its foundation models, while still letting you show up in ChatGPT search. Whether you want that is your call, and it's a fair one to make deliberately rather than by accident.

Changes take a little while. It can take about 24 hours for robots.txt updates to be picked up for search. So don't edit the file, test it ten minutes later and conclude it's broken.

This is the part people most want to be more complicated than it is.

Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode don't ask for anything extra. To be eligible as a supporting link, a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet. That's it. You don't need new machine-readable files, AI text files or markup. There's no special schema.org structured data required.

Indexing and serving still aren't guaranteed. Being eligible isn't the same as being chosen. But it does mean the person offering you a special file that "unlocks" AI visibility is selling you something Google says you don't need.

Foundations get you into the room. Content is what gets you picked.

Think about the real questions your customers ask before they hire you. Not the keyword-shaped versions, the actual ones. How much does it usually cost? How long does it take? Do you cover my area? What happens if something goes wrong? What should I have ready before you arrive?

Write pages that answer those questions, in plain text, in plain language. Put the answer near the top. Then add the specifics only you know: how you actually work, what you do differently, the areas you serve, the things you won't do. A generic page could have been written by anyone, which is exactly why a tool summarising the web has no reason to prefer it.

Specifics are your edge. A competitor can copy your layout in an afternoon. They can't copy your experience of the job.

And keep it honest. If a page claims something you can't back up, you've given a reader, and any system summarising your site, a reason to look elsewhere.

Forget dashboards for a moment. Start with the simplest test available.

1. Write down ten questions a customer might ask when looking for what you sell. Use their wording, not yours.
2. Put each one into ChatGPT and into Google's AI answers.
3. Note whether you appear, who does, and what they seem to have said that you haven't.
4. Repeat monthly, using the same questions, so you can compare like with like.

It's rough and unscientific. It's also free, and it tells you far more than a vendor's promise ever will. Answers vary from one asking to the next, so look for patterns over several months rather than reading too much into a single result.

For Google, there's a proper report too. Traffic from AI features such as AI Overviews and AI Mode is included in Search Console's Performance report, under the Web search type. Since June 2026 Google has also been rolling out a separate Search Generative AI performance report, which shows impressions in AI features on their own. It is reaching a subset of sites first, so you may not have it yet.

Be wary of anyone claiming a special file, a particular schema or a secret setting that guarantees inclusion. Google says no special markup or AI text files are needed. OpenAI's crawler documentation talks about robots.txt, not special files. If a pitch rests on a hidden lever, the lever probably isn't there.

The same goes for anyone promising you'll rank in ChatGPT by a certain date. How to rank in chatgpt is a fair question; it just doesn't have a guaranteed answer. What you do have is a short list of sensible things to do, and a way to see whether they're helping.

If you'd like to know where your site's gaps are, Seracu offers a free snapshot: a look at which topics your site is missing compared with its competitors. It's a sensible first step before you decide what to write next.