You may have noticed it yourself. You search Google, and before any links appear, there’s a written answer at the top. Or a customer mentions they “asked ChatGPT” which local companies to call. Either way, a new question follows: how does a business end up in those answers?
There’s a lot of noise about this right now, much of it from people selling a new service called something like “AI optimization.” But the reality is more reassuring than the noise. The businesses most likely to be cited by AI tools are generally the ones already doing the basics of search well.
How do AI tools pick their sources?
When ChatGPT or Google’s AI features answer a question with current information, they typically search the web first, read some of the pages they find and write a summary. Many answers include links to the pages they drew from.
So the first requirement is simple: the AI tool has to be able to find and read your page. The second is that your page has to contain a clear, trustworthy answer worth citing.
What does Google say about AI Overviews?
Google is direct on this point. Its documentation for site owners says: “There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary.” It adds that you don’t need to create new “AI text files” or special markup.
In other words, the pages Google considers good search results are the same pages it draws on for AI answers. If someone tells you that you need a special file or a separate AI strategy to appear there, Google says otherwise.
What about ChatGPT?
ChatGPT’s search feature uses its own crawler, a program called OAI-SearchBot that visits websites and reads their pages. OpenAI’s documentation says the bot “is used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT’s search features,” and that sites wanting to appear should allow OAI-SearchBot in their robots.txt file. Sites that block it are left out of ChatGPT’s search answers.
A robots.txt file is a short text file on your website that tells crawlers which pages they may visit. Most small business sites allow everything by default. But some website platforms and security services include settings that block AI crawlers, so it’s worth asking your web designer to check. Our guide on why a website isn’t showing up on Google covers similar settings that can hide a site from Google.
What kind of content gets cited?
AI tools are trying to answer a specific question accurately. The pages they cite usually make that easy.
A direct answer, early. If someone asks “how often should I replace my water heater,” a page that answers in its first few paragraphs is easier to cite than one that buries the answer under an introduction about the company.
Specific, verifiable detail. Clear numbers, named sources and concrete examples give an AI tool something solid to repeat. Vague claims don’t.
Original knowledge. An AI tool can summarize general information from anywhere. What it can’t find elsewhere is your experience: how you diagnose a problem, what you see most often in Upstate homes, what you tell customers to watch for. Google’s content guidance asks whether a page offers “original information, reporting, research, or analysis,” and that’s the kind of material worth citing.
Clear structure. Headings that match real questions help both readers and AI tools find the part of the page they need.
Does this change how a local business should blog?
Not much, and that’s the good news. The same articles that help you rank on Google, ones that answer real customer questions clearly and specifically, are the ones AI tools tend to draw from. Our explainer on whether blogging helps SEO covers what those articles have in common.
If anything, AI search raises the bar on generic content. When an AI tool can produce a passable general answer itself, the pages it bothers to cite are the ones that add something.
What about local recommendations?
When someone asks an AI tool to recommend a business nearby, the answer often draws on the same signals as local search: business listings, reviews and websites that clearly describe the services offered and the area served. A complete Google Business Profile and steady reviews matter here too. Our guide to local SEO for small businesses walks through those foundations.
Can you track it?
Partly. Google Search Console includes traffic from AI features in its overall search reporting. Some analytics tools show visits referred from ChatGPT. It’s still an imperfect picture, so the more reliable measure remains whether your pages rank and get visited for the questions you’re targeting.
Getting cited by AI isn’t a new discipline. It’s the old one, done well: being the clearest, most useful answer to a real question. If you’d like help writing those answers, I’m a Greenville copywriter, and you can book a 15-minute call.