A customer who used to type “best roofer near me” into Google now types it into ChatGPT. They get one or two names back. Not a page of ten blue links they scroll through. One or two names.
If you’re not one of them, you aren’t on page two. You simply don’t exist for that question.
That’s the part that catches business owners off guard. Traditional search gave you partial credit. AI search doesn’t. You’re either in the answer or you’re nowhere.
The good news is that this isn’t magic, and it isn’t luck. There are specific, knowable reasons a business gets named and another doesn’t. The bad news is that most of the advice floating around treats ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews as one thing. They aren’t. They work differently, and if you optimise for the wrong one you’ll waste months.
ChatGPT and Perplexity are not the same machine
This is the distinction almost nobody makes, and it changes what you should actually do.
Perplexity searches the live web. Ask it a question and it goes out, retrieves pages, reads them, and writes an answer with citations attached. It’s doing a search, right then, in front of you. That makes it the closer cousin to classic SEO: if you rank well for the terms in the question, you have a real shot at being one of the sources it pulls.
ChatGPT leans on two things at once. It has what it learned during training — a vast snapshot of the web, frozen at a cutoff date — and, when it searches, it leans heavily on Bing’s index. Research on citation patterns found that pages ranking in Bing’s top 20 for a query are substantially more likely to be cited in a ChatGPT answer than pages that don’t.
Read that again, because it’s the most actionable sentence in this article: Bing matters now. Most business owners have never thought about Bing in their lives. It’s been a punchline for fifteen years. It is now a direct pipeline into the most-used AI assistant on earth.
So the work splits. Rank in Bing to reach ChatGPT. Rank for the question itself to reach Perplexity. There’s heavy overlap — good SEO serves both — but if you’ve only ever optimised for Google, you have a blind spot.
Write the answer, not the build-up
Here’s the single biggest structural change you can make this week.
Most business websites bury the answer. A page about roof repair costs opens with three paragraphs on the company’s history, its values, its commitment to quality. The actual number — the thing the person asked — sits in paragraph seven.
A human skims past that. A language model often doesn’t get that far, and when it does, it can’t cleanly lift a sentence that answers the question.
Flip it. State the answer in the first two sentences, then explain. Use the real question as your heading — “How much does roof repair cost?” rather than “Our Pricing Philosophy.” Put comparable facts in a table. Keep each answer self-contained, so a model can quote one paragraph without needing the three before it.
This isn’t writing for robots at the expense of people. Answer-first writing is better for readers too. It just happens to also be the format that gets lifted into AI answers.
The part you cannot shortcut
Now the uncomfortable bit.
The businesses that AI assistants name are not necessarily the best at what they do. They’re the ones the model has seen mentioned, consistently and clearly, across sources it trusts.
You cannot edit your way into that. There’s no tag you add to your homepage that makes ChatGPT remember you. What gets a model to associate your name with your category is the same thing that has always built authority: other credible people and publications mentioning you, by name, in context.
That means genuine coverage. Industry publications. Local news. Trade bodies. Directories that real people actually use. Review platforms with real reviews on them. Earning those mentions is slower and less glamorous than a technical checklist, and it’s the thing that moves the needle most.
Anyone selling you a quick route into an AI model’s training data is selling you something that doesn’t exist.
Five things worth doing now
In rough order of effort-to-payoff:
- Check you aren’t blocking the crawlers. This is the one that stings, because it’s invisible and it’s fatal. GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended each need to be allowed in your robots.txt — and, just as importantly, not blocked by your host’s firewall or bot protection. We’ve found live sites with a perfectly open robots.txt whose server was quietly refusing AI crawlers anyway. Test it, don’t assume it.
- Add schema markup. Structured data tells a machine, in plain terms, what your business is, where it operates, what it charges, and who stands behind it. It removes guesswork. Organization, LocalBusiness, FAQ and Article markup cover most of what a small business needs.
- Rewrite your top ten pages answer-first. Not all of them. The ten that matter — the ones tied to what you actually sell.
- Fix your Bing presence. Claim Bing Places. Submit your sitemap in Bing Webmaster Tools. Check where you rank there, not just in Google. Most of your competitors haven’t bothered.
- Build real mentions, steadily. One genuine piece of coverage a month beats fifty directory listings nobody reads.
How you’ll know it’s working
You can’t check AI visibility with a rank tracker, because there’s no ranking. There’s a named business or there isn’t.
What we do instead is simple enough to copy: write down the twenty or thirty questions a customer would actually ask before hiring you. Run them through ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews. Record who gets named. Repeat monthly.
That gives you a baseline and a trend. It’s not a vanity number, it’s a direct read on whether buyers hear your name at the moment they’re deciding.
Expect this to take time. Technical fixes can show up in weeks. Shifting whether a model consistently names you takes months, because you’re changing a pattern across the whole web, not a setting on your site.
The honest version
Nobody controls what ChatGPT says. Not us, not any agency. Anyone promising guaranteed AI citations is making a promise they have no mechanism to keep.
What you can control is whether you’re eligible: whether the crawlers can reach you, whether your pages answer questions in a liftable form, whether your business is described consistently everywhere it appears, and whether credible sources mention you at all.
Do those four things and you move from invisible to in the running. That’s the whole game.
Most of your competitors are still arguing about whether any of this matters. That’s your window.
Want to know where you currently stand? We run the questions your customers ask through the major AI engines and show you who gets named today — a free AI visibility check, no pitch attached.