Why AI answers change how customers find you
People increasingly ask an assistant instead of scanning a results page: “Which dentist near me is good with kids?” The assistant replies with a short list or a single recommendation, and there is no page two. Whether you appear depends on how clearly those systems can work out who you are, what you do, where you do it and whether other sources back you up.
Assistants draw on a mix of material: your website, maps and directory data, reviews, articles, and what other sites say about you. They are run by third parties and they change often, which is why nobody can promise a particular mention. What you can control is how clear and consistent your information is.
What I check first
Every engagement starts with a short audit of how findable you are for the questions your customers actually ask:
- How ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews describe your business today, tested with a handful of realistic questions.
- Whether your name, address, phone, services and opening hours are identical everywhere they appear.
- Whether your site says plainly what you do and where, in text a crawler can read rather than only in images or scripts.
- Whether structured data is present and valid, and whether robots.txt blocks crawlers you want.
- Which third-party pages mention you, and what they say.
You get a short written report with the gaps ranked by effort and impact.
What I fix
I clean up your business entity so every source tells the same story, add schema markup (such as LocalBusiness, Service and FAQPage) so machines can read your details, and rewrite key pages answer-first: lead with the direct answer, then the detail, with FAQs phrased the way people ask.
I also review llms.txt, a simple text file that summarises a site for AI tools. Support for it is inconsistent, so treat it as a small extra and not a switch that turns on mentions. The bigger wins usually come from consistent listings, good reviews (see Google Maps and local SEO) and mentions on relevant, trusted sites.
How it fits with ordinary SEO
AI visibility is not a replacement for SEO. Most of the groundwork overlaps: a fast, crawlable site, clear pages and useful content. It is the same discipline pointed at a new audience, which is why I run it alongside content marketing and website design work rather than as a separate trick.
How results are measured
Assistants don't give you a rankings report, so I run a fixed set of customer-style questions every month across the main tools. I record whether you are mentioned, how you are described and which sources are cited, then compare month to month. Where analytics can show visits from AI tools, I include those too. It is a young field, so I am upfront about what can and cannot be measured.
