How to get your small business found in AI search

Someone asks ChatGPT for a good physio in Chatswood. Someone else types 'best accountant for tradies' into Google and reads the answer at the top of the page without ever scrolling. Three businesses get named. If yours isn't one of them, you weren't beaten on price or on service. You just weren't in the answer.

This is the question landing in my inbox most weeks right now. Here's the honest version, including the parts the people selling AI search packages tend to leave out.

First, some perspective

AI referrals are still a small share of most websites' traffic. How small depends entirely on whose research you read. Published 2026 benchmarks land anywhere between roughly 0.3% and 1% of visits, and they disagree with each other badly enough that I'd treat any single figure as a rough direction, not a fact.

What isn't in dispute is that those visits behave differently. Someone arriving from an AI answer has already been recommended. They're checking you out, not weighing up ten options. A small amount of very warm traffic, and it's growing.

So it's worth doing. It isn't worth panicking about, and it certainly isn't worth signing a retainer before you've checked whether you have a problem.

How an AI actually decides who to mention

Take the mystique out and three things are happening.

It retrieves. Ask a current model about local services and it searches the web and reads pages, the same open web Google indexes. It isn't recalling your business from memory.

It works out who you are. It has to establish that you're a business, what kind, where, and who you serve. Marketers call this entity recognition. In practice it means: can a machine state what you do in one sentence without guessing.

It looks for agreement. One source saying you're the best paediatric dentist in Newcastle is a claim. Four independent sources saying it is a pattern. Your own website is only ever one source.

Almost everything useful follows from those three. Most of it is what good search work always was, done more literally.

Answer the question in the first forty words

AI answers are assembled from passages, not whole pages. So the passage has to be liftable. Put the direct answer immediately under the heading, in plain declarative sentences, before the context and the caveats.

Write your headings as the questions customers actually ask. 'How much does a brand health check cost' beats 'Our approach to pricing'. Then answer with specifics: numbers, suburbs, timeframes, and who it isn't for.

Vague copy is unquotable. No model can lift 'we deliver tailored solutions' into an answer, because it doesn't say anything.

'We run brand health checks for small businesses, from $750, usually back within a week' can be quoted. That's the whole difference.

Be the same business everywhere

Write one description of your business, about 25 words, and use it everywhere. Website, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, directories, association listings, proposals. Same name, same category, same words. Inconsistency is the most common reason a model can't resolve a small business confidently, and it's free to fix.

If you serve customers locally, your Google Business Profile is the most authoritative single record of your business that exists. Categories, service area, hours, services, reviews. Reviews count twice: the rating, and the language your customers use, which is usually closer to how people search than anything written on your website.

Structured data is worth adding and less technical than it sounds. It's just labelling your facts in the page code so a machine doesn't have to infer them: name, location, services, prices, hours, and links to your other profiles.

Get mentioned by people who aren't you

You can't out-spend the national chains. You can out-cite them.

Corroboration is where small businesses are genuinely competitive, because it's earned rather than bought. Industry association listings. Local news. Supplier and partner pages. Podcast appearances. Community sponsorship pages. Awards. Client sites. Real directories in your sector, not link farms. Anywhere your business is described accurately by somebody else, in text a crawler can read.

One good association listing will usually do more for this than a month of posting.

Check you're not blocking the door

This one is unglamorous, and it's the fault I find most often. Bot-blocking rules on your host, your CDN or your security plugin can quietly stop AI crawlers reaching your site at all. Google's John Mueller has made the point directly: an accidental block does far more damage than any missing file.

Check your robots.txt. Check the bot settings on your firewall. Then check your pages still read properly with JavaScript switched off, because content that only appears after a script runs may never be seen.

Three things being sold right now that don't work

llms.txt as a ranking factor

A small file listing your key pages for AI systems. Google's Gary Illyes has said Google doesn't support it and has no plans to, and John Mueller compared it to the old keywords meta tag. Google's own AI optimisation guidance, updated in June 2026, says you don't need special AI files or markup to appear in its generative results. An Ahrefs study of 137,000 sites found 97% of llms.txt files received no traffic at all in May 2026.

Brandling publishes one. It costs nothing to maintain, it's honest, and it may matter later. It is not why anyone finds us, and nobody should be charging you for it.

'GEO packages' that are the old playbook renamed

Generative engine optimisation is a real idea. It's also a convenient new label for keyword stuffing. If the deliverable is forty thin pages of AI-written content aimed at question phrases, that's the 2012 playbook with a 2026 invoice.

Guaranteed placement in ChatGPT

Nobody controls what a model says. Answers shift with phrasing, with the user, with the day. You can make yourself far more likely to be chosen. You cannot buy the spot, and anyone guaranteeing it is selling certainty they don't have.

How to check where you stand, in twenty minutes

• Write down the five questions a customer would actually type. Their words, not your service names.
• Run each one in ChatGPT, and in Google where an AI answer appears at the top. Note who gets named.
• Run them again with your suburb or city added. Local intent changes the answer completely.
• In Google Analytics, look for referrals from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and gemini.google.com. Small numbers still tell you something is working.
• In Search Console, watch whether searches for your business name are rising. People see you in an answer, then look you up.

Do that before you buy anything from anyone. It costs nothing, and it tells you whether you have a visibility problem, a corroboration problem or a conversion problem. Those need three different fixes, and only one of them is about AI.

The short version

AI didn't change what makes a business easy to recommend. It made it literal. Be clear about what you do. Be consistent about it everywhere. Be specific enough to quote. Give other people reasons to describe you accurately.

That was good marketing before any of this. It just used to be optional.

Quick answers

How do I get my small business to show up in ChatGPT?

Make sure AI crawlers are not blocked from your site, describe your business the same way everywhere, answer the questions customers actually ask directly on your pages with specific numbers and locations, and build accurate mentions on sources other than your own website.

Does llms.txt help my business appear in AI search?

There is no evidence that it does. Google has stated it does not use llms.txt, and no major AI provider has committed to it as a citation signal. It is harmless to publish, but it should not be sold to you as a ranking factor.

What is the difference between SEO and AI search optimisation?

SEO aims to rank a page in a list of links. AI search optimisation aims to get a passage quoted and your business named inside an answer. The underlying work overlaps heavily: a crawlable site, clear specific content, and credible third-party mentions.

How long does it take to show up in AI answers?

Changes to your own website can be picked up within weeks. Building the third-party corroboration that makes a model confident enough to recommend you usually takes months.

Do small businesses need to pay for AI search optimisation?

Not before checking where they stand. Run the five questions a customer would type through ChatGPT and Google first. That tells you whether you have a visibility problem, a corroboration problem or a conversion problem, and they need different fixes.

This article is general guidance. If you want your own search and AI visibility checked properly, against your competitors and your actual customer questions, a triage call is the fastest way to start.