The short version: If you ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google’s AI Overviews about your industry and your business doesn’t come up, you’re not imagining it and you’re not alone. Getting cited by AI tools is a different game to ranking on Google, it rewards different things, and most small business owners are optimising for the wrong one entirely.
The morning I asked ChatGPT about my own industry
A few months back I typed a question into ChatGPT that I ask clients to try all the time: “who are the best AI consultants for small businesses in the UK.” I half expected to see my own name. I didn’t. What I got instead was a list of five names, three of them big consultancies I’d never heard clients mention once in real conversations, one American SaaS blog dressed up as a person, and a Reddit thread from 2023.
That stung a bit, if I’m honest. I’ve been doing this work for years, I’ve spoken from stages in front of thousands of people, I’m on Forbes’ list of social media influencers, and the machine that a growing chunk of my potential clients now consult before they consult Google had simply never heard of me. So I did what I tell my clients to do. I stopped feeling sorry for myself and I went digging into why.
What I found changed how I write, how I structure content, and honestly how I think about the next five years of marketing. This post is that dig, laid out plainly.
Why this matters more than most people think
Gartner predicted back in 2024 that traditional search engine volume would drop by around 25 percent by 2026 as people shift to AI chatbots and AI-powered assistants for answers. We’re now in 2026 and anyone running a small business should be feeling that shift already, even if the analytics dashboard doesn’t spell it out cleanly.
Here’s the practical version of what that means. Someone looking for a bookkeeper in Leeds used to type it into Google, click three results, compare websites, then pick one. Now a growing number of people type the same question into ChatGPT and get a confident, specific answer with two or three names attached, and they never open a browser tab at all. If your business isn’t one of those two or three names, you have lost that customer before you even knew they were looking.
This isn’t a future problem. It’s a right-now problem that most small business owners haven’t checked for themselves, because it’s uncomfortable and because nobody’s shown them how.
Do this test on your own business today
Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overview (just search something and look for the AI box at the top) and run through these in order:
- Ask for “best [your service] in [your town or niche]” and see if you appear
- Ask a specific question your ideal customer would ask, phrased exactly how they’d phrase it, not how you’d phrase it in a meeting
- Ask the AI to compare you against your two biggest competitors by name and see what it knows
- Ask “who is [your name or business name]” and see what comes back, if anything
I do this exercise with every new consulting client now, before we talk strategy, before we talk content, before anything. It takes ten minutes and it tells you more about your actual market position than a year of vanity metrics on Instagram. Most business owners have never done it once. If you take one thing from this post, do this exercise this afternoon.
What AI tools pull from (and why your website alone won’t cut it)
This is where it gets uncomfortable, and it’s the bit most marketing blogs skip because it doesn’t sell a neat six-step course.
Large language models don’t crawl your website the way Google does and rank it on the spot. They were trained on a huge snapshot of the internet, and increasingly they layer live retrieval on top, pulling from a smaller set of sources they trust more: Wikipedia, established news outlets, Reddit and Quora threads, industry directories, and sites with strong existing authority. A shiny new website with beautiful copy and zero external mentions is, to an AI system, basically a ghost. It might exist. It has almost nothing vouching for it.
That’s the uncomfortable truth nobody wants to hear when they’ve just spent three months and a few thousand pounds on a rebrand: the AI doesn’t care how good your website looks. It cares whether other trusted sources talk about you, and how consistently they describe what you do.
Compare that to how brands like Figma or Mailchimp show up everywhere in AI answers about design tools or email marketing. It’s not because their websites are technically perfect, though they’re good. It’s because thousands of independent sources, review sites, forums, journalists, other bloggers, mention them the same way, over and over, which is exactly the pattern I broke down in my piece on Figma’s marketing strategy and again in the one on Mailchimp’s marketing strategy. Both built a reputation that existed outside their own website long before AI search was a thing, and now they’re reaping the reward for it without having changed a thing.
The bit where I tell you the annoying truth about “AI SEO”
There’s a whole cottage industry right now selling “AI SEO” or “GEO” (generative engine optimisation) as if it’s a brand new discipline you must pay someone thousands of pounds to master. Some of it is useful. A lot of it is regular content marketing with a new label stapled on, sold at a markup because the word “AI” is in it.
Here’s what moves the needle, in the order I’d tackle it if I were rebuilding visibility from zero, which, let’s be honest, is roughly where I was a few months ago:
- Get mentioned on sites that already have AI’s trust. That means digital PR, guest posts on established industry sites, being quoted in journalist round-ups (HARO and Qwoted still work), and answering questions on Quora and relevant subreddits under your real name and business
- Write content that answers one specific question in the first two sentences. AI tools pull short, direct, quotable answers. Bury your answer under 400 words of preamble and it gets skipped in favour of a competitor who just said the thing plainly
- Keep your business description consistent everywhere. Your Google Business Profile, your LinkedIn, your website’s about page, your directory listings, should all describe what you do in nearly identical language. Inconsistency confuses the pattern-matching that AI models rely on
- Build a genuine Wikipedia-adjacent footprint. You likely won’t get a Wikipedia page and that’s fine, but industry wikis, established directories, and.gov or.edu mentions where relevant carry real weight
- Stop chasing keywords and start answering real questions. Structure content the way I described in my post on using interactive tools to engage visitors, give something concrete and useful, because AI models increasingly cite tools and calculators as sources people find helpful, not just articles
A short story about doing this the slow, unglamorous way
When I rebuilt my own visibility, I didn’t hire an agency to game the system. I went back to basics that felt almost embarrassingly old fashioned. I pitched myself to five podcasts in my niche over six weeks. Three said yes. I answered eleven questions on Quora about AI adoption for small businesses, using my real name each time, no links, no pitch, just useful answers. I updated every single directory listing I had, LinkedIn, my Google Business Profile, three industry directories I’d forgotten I was even on, so they all said the same thing about what I do in almost the same words.
Three months later I ran the same ChatGPT test again. My name showed up, once, attached to a podcast appearance and a quote in an industry round-up. Not top of the list. Not where I’d like to be yet. But present, for the first time, where before there had been nothing at all. That’s the honest pace of this work. It’s not a hack. It’s a slow rebuild of the same kind of reputation that used to matter before Google existed, just aimed at a new set of readers who happen to be machines.
What this means for content you’re already writing
If you’re doing any content marketing at all, and you should be, the shift is subtle but real. The people who built useful, evergreen content years before AI search existed are the ones benefiting most now, almost by accident. Joe Pulizzi built his entire career on the idea that useful content compounds over years rather than weeks, and the lessons I took from his approach to content feel more relevant now than when I first wrote them, because AI models reward exactly that kind of patient, specific, helpful content over quick keyword-stuffed posts chasing this week’s trend.
Brands that built a strong visual and narrative identity early, the kind I covered when I broke down GoPro’s marketing strategy and separately Instagram’s marketing strategy, are also showing up disproportionately in AI answers, not because they optimised for it, but because their story got told and retold by other people for over a decade. That’s the compounding effect AI search rewards. Start now and you’re planting a tree whose shade you might not sit in for a year or two.
Where a lot of small business owners get this wrong
The mistake I see most often, and I made a version of it myself for longer than I’d like to admit, is treating this as a technical SEO problem to solve once and forget. It isn’t. It’s an ongoing reputation project, closer to PR than to SEO. You don’t fix it with a plugin or a checklist you run through once in January.
The second mistake is panicking and outsourcing the whole thing to an agency promising guaranteed AI citations. Nobody can guarantee that, the models change constantly and nobody outside the AI labs fully controls what gets surfaced. What a decent AI consultant for your small business can help with is auditing where you currently stand, building the right mix of PR, directory consistency, and content structure for your specific niche, and setting up a realistic tracking system so you’re not guessing month to month whether any of it is working.
The third mistake, and this is the one that quietly kills momentum, is giving up after one attempt because nothing changed in two weeks. This isn’t a paid ads campaign. There’s no dashboard that goes green on Tuesday. It moves in months, sometimes in a single well-placed mention that suddenly starts feeding into a dozen AI answers, and you often won’t know exactly which action caused the shift.
A realistic six month plan if you want to do this
- Month 1: run the AI visibility test above, audit every directory and profile for consistent wording, fix the obvious gaps
- Month 2: pitch three podcasts or publications in your niche, write two pieces of content that answer one specific customer question in the opening two sentences
- Month 3: answer ten to fifteen genuine questions on Quora or relevant Reddit communities, no self-promotion, just useful answers under your real name
- Month 4: follow up on any earned mentions, ask for your name or business to be linked or spelled correctly, chase down any inaccurate directory listings
- Month 5: re-run the AI visibility test, note any change, double down on whichever channel produced a mention
- Month 6: repeat the whole cycle, because this isn’t a project with an end date, it’s now part of how marketing works
Free resource: The Google Business Profile Optimisation Checklist.
Frequently asked questions
Can I pay to get my business mentioned by ChatGPT or Google AI Overviews?
No, not directly. There’s no ad product that buys you a citation in an AI answer. The closest thing is earning genuine mentions on sites the AI already trusts, through PR, guest content, and directories, which takes weeks or months rather than the minutes a paid ad campaign takes.
How is AI search different from normal SEO?
Normal SEO ranks pages based largely on your own website’s signals plus backlinks. AI search leans much more heavily on how consistently other trusted sources describe your business, and rewards short, direct answers over long keyword-optimised pages. A great website with zero outside mentions can rank fine on Google and still be invisible to ChatGPT.
Is it worth hiring someone to help with this, or can I do it myself?
You can absolutely do the basics yourself, the audit, the directory consistency, the Quora answers, cost nothing but time. Where it’s worth bringing in help is when you need a structured plan across PR, content, and tracking, or when you simply don’t have the hours to chase it consistently for six months, which is where most small business owners fall short.
How long before I see my business show up in AI answers?
Based on what I’ve seen with my own visibility rebuild and with clients, expect three to six months for a first noticeable mention if you’re consistent, and longer to become a reliably cited name in your niche. There’s no shortcut here, it’s a compounding effort closer to reputation building than to a marketing campaign with a fixed end date.
Related reading: Why AI Pricing Advice Is Quietly Training Small Business Owners to Undercharge and AI Chatbots Are Answering Your Customers Before They Reach Your Website.
Related: how to master blogger outreach in 6 steps.
Worth doing first: the AI Visibility Checker shows you exactly which engines mention you today and which ignore you.
