Nyah Eliud
Why this matters now
A lot of buying research no longer starts in a search box. Someone asks an assistant for a recommendation, gets three names, and those three names are the shortlist. If you aren’t one of them, you were never in the running. Worse than a search results page, you can’t even see that you lost.
Almost nobody in this market is working on it yet. That’s exactly why it’s worth working on now.
First, find out what they already say
Before you change anything, ask. Open ChatGPT, Gemini and Google’s AI mode, and ask the questions a customer would ask. The best supplier of your service in your city. Who to call for a particular problem. What a fair price is.
Then ask about your own business by name. You’re looking for three things: whether you get mentioned at all, whether what it says is right, and where the information seems to have come from. Wrong information is more urgent than no information, because it’s actively costing you.
Be a clearly defined thing
Assistants think in terms of businesses, not just pages. They want to be sure you exist, what kind of business you are, where you work and what you sell. The clearer that picture, the more willing a model is to name you.
- Structured data on your site: Organization, LocalBusiness, Service and FAQ markup
- The same business name, address and phone number everywhere, with no variations
- A properly complete Google Business Profile
- An about page that plainly states what you do, where, and since when
- Named authors and real credentials on your content
Being talked about beats being linked to
Classic SEO taught everyone to chase links. For AI visibility, what seems to matter more is being talked about in places these models trust: directories, industry roundups, local news, forums, review sites, and the websites of organisations you work with.
Your business name, next to your city and your service, on a page that has nothing to do with you, is worth a lot here. It counts even when there’s no link at all.
A practical starting pointList every place your business is already mentioned. Fix the wrong ones, finish the thin ones, and only then go looking for new ones.
Answer the question, do not sell at it
Models quote content that answers a question cleanly. A page that spends four paragraphs on how passionate your team is before it gets to the answer won’t be quoted. A page that gives the answer in the first two sentences and then explains it will.
Write the pages your customers actually search for: what things cost, how long they take, what can go wrong, how to choose between options. Put the answer near the top, give real numbers, and save the selling for later.
Where each assistant gets its answers
The assistants do not all work the same way, which is why a business can be named by one and missed by another. In broad terms:
| Assistant | Where its answers come from | What helps you most |
|---|---|---|
| Google AI Overviews and AI Mode | Google’s own search index | Good SEO. Google says no special optimisation is needed |
| ChatGPT | Its training data, plus live web search for current questions | Clear pages, consistent listings, mentions on other sites |
| Gemini | Google’s index and its own knowledge | A complete Google Business Profile and a well-structured site |
| Perplexity | Live web search, with sources cited | Pages that answer the question directly, easy to quote |
| Claude | Its training data, plus web search where enabled | Accurate, factual pages and consistent details elsewhere |
The common thread is consistency. When your name, address, services and prices say the same thing on your site, your profile and the directories, every assistant has an easier job identifying you and a reason to trust what it finds.
Check again in ninety days
This is a slow signal. Models get retrained and their sources get re-read on their own schedule. Treat it like SEO: do the work, test again after three months, and write down what changed.
If you would rather not do this yourself, our free SEO and AI visibility audit checks what assistants currently say about your business and tells you where the gaps are.
Go further: the AI and automation guide, our automation service, automation prices, or the five automations to build first.
Questions people ask
No. There is no way to buy a mention in an assistant's answer. The work is making true information about your business easy to find and consistent everywhere.
For Google's AI features, no: Google says normal SEO is enough. Structured data that matches your visible page helps every system understand you, and you should not block their crawlers in robots.txt.
Generative engine optimisation: the work of getting your business named in the answers AI assistants give. It builds on SEO and adds consistency across profiles, directories and mentions.
Ask them the questions your customers would ask, such as the best provider of your service in your city, in English and French. Note who is named and what is said about you, and repeat every month.
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