Straight answer: ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews are already answering questions your customers used to Google, and most small businesses have no idea whether they’re being mentioned in those answers or quietly left out. You can influence this with plain, specific, well-structured content, but it comes with a trade-off most people selling “AI visibility” packages won’t say out loud: getting cited doesn’t always mean getting clicked.
The test I ran on my own clients
Back in September I sat down with a client who runs a small accountancy firm in Reading, six staff, decent local reputation, nothing flashy. I asked ChatGPT “who’s a good accountant for a small business in Reading” and three other firms came up. Not hers. Same question on Perplexity, same result. Her website ranks on page one of Google for half a dozen relevant terms. None of that mattered to the AI models.
So we spent an afternoon rewriting her “about” page and her services pages to answer questions the way a person asks them, not the way SEO taught us to write for a decade. Instead of “Comprehensive Accounting Solutions For Growing Businesses,” we wrote sentences like “We do bookkeeping, VAT returns and payroll for businesses with 1 to 20 staff, and our fees start at 180 pounds a month.” Specific. Boring. Answerable in one sentence, which is exactly what an AI model needs to lift and quote.
Six weeks later, asking the same question, she showed up in Perplexity’s answer with a one-line summary pulled almost word for word from that rewritten page. ChatGPT still didn’t mention her. That’s the honest state of this right now: it’s patchy, it’s inconsistent between models, and anyone telling you they can guarantee a result is guessing same as the rest of us.
What’s going on behind the scenes
Large language models don’t crawl your site in real time the way Google does. They’re trained on huge scrapes of the web (often months old), and increasingly they layer live web search on top for anything time-sensitive. Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews lean more on live retrieval, which is why my client showed up there first. ChatGPT’s browsing and citation behaviour has improved a lot through 2025 and into 2026, but it still favours pages that are structurally easy to lift a clean answer from: a direct question as a heading, a short factual answer straight after it, no throat-clearing.
This is the same logic behind those interactive calculators I’ve written about before, oddly enough. A calculator that spits out “your VAT return will cost roughly X” is exactly the kind of concrete, quotable, self-contained answer both humans and AI models want. The format that converts a browsing visitor also happens to be the format an AI model can quote cleanly. That’s not a coincidence, it’s the same underlying behaviour: people and machines both want a fast, specific answer, not a paragraph of scene-setting.
The part that makes agencies uncomfortable
Here’s the bit almost nobody selling “AI SEO” audits will put in writing: getting your business mentioned inside a ChatGPT or Google AI Overview answer can reduce your website traffic, not grow it. If someone asks “what does a plumber charge for a boiler service in Manchester” and the AI answer says “typically 80 to 150 pounds, firms like X and Y offer this,” the person often never clicks through. They got their answer. Early data from several publishers through 2025 showed click-through rates on pages summarised inside AI Overviews dropping by anywhere from 15% to over 40% compared to a normal blue-link ranking, depending on the query type.
So the honest goal for a small business isn’t “get mentioned by AI” as an end in itself. It’s brand recall and being the name attached to the answer, even when the click doesn’t happen. That’s a different, less measurable win, closer to what a billboard does than what a Google ad does. If your entire growth plan depends on click-through traffic, this shift should worry you. If your growth plan depends on people remembering your name when they’re finally ready to pick up the phone, it’s a gift.
This is not a new problem. Brands that have survived decades of channel shifts got there by building a name people already trust before they ever search for anything, which is worth remembering when you look at how differently GoDaddy built recognisability despite selling something as unglamorous as domain names. Recall beats a single click, every time, over a long enough run.
What to change on your site, step by step
These are the exact changes that moved the needle for that Reading accountancy client and two other small businesses I worked with in late 2025:
- Turn every service page into a question and answer. Heading: “How much does bookkeeping cost for a small business in the UK?” Answer directly underneath in the first sentence, then explain. Don’t bury the number three paragraphs down.
- Use real numbers, not ranges dressed up as vagueness. “Prices from 180 pounds a month” gets quoted. “Competitive, tailored pricing” gets skipped entirely because there’s nothing there to lift.
- Name yourself and your location in plain text, repeatedly, naturally. AI models weight named entities heavily. If your business name and town appear together several times in normal sentences, not just in the footer, that connection gets reinforced.
- Write in first person with specific experience. “I’ve filed over 400 VAT returns for small retailers since 2019” is the sort of sentence a model treats as a credible, citable claim. Generic marketing copy gets treated as noise.
- Build one useful free tool or checklist per service. A downloadable checklist, a simple calculator, a comparison table. These get referenced by name because they’re specific and structured.
- Check your Wikipedia and industry directory presence. Models still lean on Wikipedia, Companies House, Trustpilot and trade body listings as trusted anchors. If you’re not listed anywhere reputable, there’s less for the model to cross-reference your claims against.
None of this is complicated. It’s tedious, and it’s the sort of unglamorous rewrite work that most business owners keep putting off because it doesn’t feel like “real marketing.” It is real marketing. It’s just marketing for an audience that includes machines reading on behalf of humans, which is a strange sentence to type but here we are in 2026.
Consistency matters more than cleverness
One thing that surprised me doing this work was how much AI models seem to reward consistency across a whole site rather than one brilliant page. If your tone, your numbers and your claims contradict each other between your homepage, your about page and your blog, the model has a harder time deciding what to trust and quote. This is the same discipline behind brands that never wobble on their message, the kind of relentless consistency you see when you study how Coco Chanel protected a single, unwavering brand identity for decades rather than chasing every trend. A small business doesn’t need a hundred pages. It needs twenty pages that all agree with each other on price, tone and claims.
There’s also a behavioural angle worth borrowing here. People (and it turns out, models trained on people) trust specific, slightly imperfect claims more than polished, vague ones. This tracks with a lot of the thinking behind Richard Thaler’s work on how people make decisions: specificity reads as honesty, and vagueness reads as spin, whether the reader is a person scanning a page or a model deciding what to summarise.
How to check where you stand right now, for free
Do this today, it takes fifteen minutes:
- Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google, and ask the exact question your ideal customer would type, three separate times over a few days, since answers shift.
- Note whether your business is named, whether a competitor is named instead, and whether any specific number or claim from your site was quoted.
- Search your own business name plus “reviews” and “pricing” to see what the model already believes about you, since sometimes it’s pulling outdated or wrong information from an old directory listing.
- Repeat monthly. This moves fast and there’s no dashboard that tracks it reliably yet for a small business budget.
If that audit turns up nothing but competitors, and you don’t have the time to rebuild twenty pages of copy around this yourself, this is one of the areas where paying for a few hours of focused help pays for itself fast, because most business owners can’t see their own site the way a language model reads it. That’s the exact gap an AI consultant working with small businesses should be closing for you in a single working session, not a six-month retainer.
The mistake I see most often
Business owners hear “AI SEO” and immediately think tone of voice, brand personality, storytelling. All of that still matters for humans reading your site, and I’d never tell anyone to strip the personality out of their brand, the same way brands that get remembered, like Headspace built a distinct, human tone that made a fairly dry subject feel approachable. But for the specific job of getting quoted inside an AI answer, personality is decoration on top of clarity, not a substitute for it. Write the plain, boring, factual answer first. Add the voice around it after. Do it backwards and the model has nothing solid to grab onto.
Frequently asked questions
Does being mentioned by ChatGPT bring in customers?
Sometimes, but often the value is brand recall rather than a direct click. Someone hears your name inside an AI answer, doesn’t click that day, and searches for you by name a few weeks later when they’re ready to buy. Treat it like local reputation, not a paid ad channel.
How long does it take to see a change after rewriting a page?
Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, which lean on live search, can shift within a few weeks. ChatGPT’s answers are slower to update since much of its knowledge comes from periodic training data plus browsing, so changes there can take longer and are less predictable, sometimes months.
Is this the same as normal SEO?
Related but not identical. Traditional SEO rewards backlinks, keyword density and page authority built over years. AI answer visibility rewards clear, specific, directly quotable answers and consistent factual claims across your site, and a page can rank nowhere on Google yet still get quoted by an AI model if it answers a question cleanly enough.
Should a small business pay someone to manage this?
If you’ve got the time, you can do the audit and rewrite yourself using the steps above, it’s not technical work. If you’re stretched thin already, a short paid session with someone who understands both marketing copy and how these models retrieve information is usually a better spend than an ongoing retainer, since most of the value comes from getting the core pages right once and revisiting quarterly.
Related reading: Your Business Now Has an AI Reputation, and You Probably Haven’t Checked It and How I Used AI to Finally Set Rates I Don’t Feel Sick About Charging.
