A growing number of your customers are asking ChatGPT, Gemini or Google’s AI Overviews before they ever type your name into a search bar. Here is how to find out what AI is telling them, and what to do if you do not like the answer.
Search behaviour has quietly shifted. Someone with a problem to solve no longer always starts with ten blue links. Increasingly, they ask an AI tool directly, and the AI gives them an answer, complete with a shortlist of businesses it thinks can help. If your business is not on that shortlist, you have lost the sale before you even knew there was a competition.
This is not a reason to panic, and it is certainly not a reason to throw money at gimmicks that promise to “hack” AI search. The businesses doing well here are the ones doing the fundamentals properly: knowing what AI currently says about them, making their website easy for a machine to understand, and being talked about in the right places. None of that is new. It is just being tested in a new way.
Below is a practical, three-stage approach for getting a grip on this, based on thinking set out by SEO consultant Marcus Miller in a recent piece for Search Engine Land, adapted here for the kind of business we work with day to day.
Stage one: find out what AI is already saying about you
Before changing anything, you need a baseline. What does AI currently say about your industry, your competitors and your business, and is any of it accurate?
Do this yourself first. Open a private or incognito browser window (so the AI tool is not personalising results based on your own history), and put yourself in a customer’s shoes. Ask three types of question:
- Problem-first questions a customer would ask before they know your name, for example “what is the best way to fix a leaking roof” or “how do I choose a solicitor for a house purchase”.
- Shortlist questions such as “best [your service] near [your town]” or “[competitor] alternatives”, to see who gets mentioned and who does not.
- Direct questions about your own business, such as “is [your business name] any good” or “[your business] reviews”, to check the AI has its facts straight.
Run the same questions across ChatGPT, Google’s AI Mode and Gemini, and each time note whether you were mentioned, who else came up, and where the AI seems to have pulled its information from.
If your business does not appear at all, resist the urge to start publishing content straight away. First work out why: is your website simply too thin on detail for AI to have anything to draw on, or is the issue that nobody online talks about you? The fix is different in each case, and it will point you towards stages two and three below.
Google gives you one genuinely useful shortcut here for its own results. The generative AI report inside Google Search Console shows which pages from your own site are actually being pulled into AI Overviews, so you are not just guessing.
Stage two: make your website impossible to misunderstand
AI tools, like search engines before them, can only recommend what they can find and understand. A cluttered, vague or thin website gives them nothing solid to work with, so this is where most of the practical work sits.
Start with the business, not the website
An SEO analysis of over 400 websites by Cyrus Shepard, examining which sites gained or lost visibility through recent Google updates, found that the winners consistently shared a handful of traits: a genuine product or service on offer, the ability for a visitor to complete a task on the page itself, something proprietary that could not simply be copied, and a tightly focused, clearly branded offering. None of these are technical SEO tweaks. They are business decisions, made before a single page is written.
Put simply, no amount of clever wording will rescue a business with nothing distinctive to say. Most businesses do have something that sets them apart. Many are just not saying it clearly, or at all.
Give every service and location its own page
Each page should stand on its own and answer the obvious questions without the visitor having to dig: what this service actually is, who it suits, roughly what it costs, what it does not cover, and what happens after someone gets in touch. Vague, generic pages that could belong to any business in your sector give AI nothing to distinguish you by.
Keep your business name, service names and locations written consistently across every page, and link related pages together sensibly. A machine reading your site should be able to work out your structure without having to guess.
Then get the basics right
| Do this | Because |
| Put the direct answer near the top of the page | AI tools lift short passages out of context, so the useful part needs to stand alone |
| Keep the site fast and the HTML clean | A slow or messy site is harder for any crawler, human or automated, to make sense of |
| Add structured data (schema markup) | It gives explicit, unambiguous context that AI tools can read directly |
| Publish real evidence: case studies, galleries, testimonials | Specifics are far harder for AI to invent or misrepresent than vague claims |
Get talked about, not just linked to
An analysis by Ahrefs of 75,000 brands, looking at what predicted appearing in Google’s AI Overviews, found that backlinks were far less closely correlated than expected. What mattered more was simply how often a brand was mentioned across the web, whether or not that mention included a link, with mentions on YouTube tracking particularly strongly.
This does not mean links are worthless, but it does mean digital PR, reviews, industry directories, and being featured or quoted elsewhere all deserve a seat at the table alongside traditional link building.
Stage three: publish content that earns its place
Once you know where the gaps are and your site is easy to understand, content is where you close the gap. The trick is matching the message to the stage a customer is at, rather than writing everything in a generic, sales-first tone.
- Early-stage visitors researching a problem want to be taught, not sold to. Explain the problem clearly and you earn the right to be named alongside the solution.
- Visitors comparing options want to know who you suit, who you do not, and what makes you the right pick. Vague positioning is invisible to a machine that can only judge you on what you have actually committed to in writing.
- Visitors who are ready to buy just need reassurance: what they get, what it costs, how long it takes, and what happens next. No persuasion needed, just clarity.
And just as important as what to publish is what to stop publishing. Old, thin blog posts that get no traffic, or content chasing a keyword that brings three visitors a month, are not neutral. They dilute your site and take up time that would be better spent on the handful of pages that actually move the needle. Be honest about what is working and cut the rest.
A simple starting checklist
- Pick one service and one customer type, and write fifteen to twenty questions a real customer might ask an AI tool.
- Run them in ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Gemini using a private browser window, and note whether you are mentioned.
- Check the generative AI report in Google Search Console to see which of your pages are already being cited.
- Be honest about whether your business has something genuinely distinctive, and say so clearly on your site.
- Make sure every service and location has its own detailed page, written consistently.
- Look for opportunities to be mentioned elsewhere: reviews, directories, local press, industry sites.
- Cut or rewrite the content on your site that nobody reads and nothing ranks for.
- Repeat the same questions in ninety days and see what has moved.
Not sure where your business currently stands in AI search?
This is exactly the kind of gap analysis we carry out as part of a full SEO review, with no pre-packaged deals and no vanity metrics, just a clear plan based on where you actually stand.
Get in touch for a straight-talking review
Graig Upton
Graig Upton is a UK SEO and Google Ads consultant with 23 years of hands-on digital marketing experience. Google certified in Ads, Analytics and Conversions, he has helped businesses ranging from local providers to national brands - including Nando's and Financial Times - dominate search and scale their leads. Based in Preston, working with clients across the UK.