AI SEO: how to get recommended by AI assistants

AI assistants recommend businesses they can find clear, consistent and easy-to-read information about. There's no sign-up form and no magic file. You work on the same things good SEO always needed, with extra attention to direct answers and to what other places say about you.

What changes when people ask instead of search

Type "spa near me" into Google and you get links and a map. Ask an assistant "where can I get a good massage on Saturday afternoon?" and you get a written answer with two or three names. If you're not one of them, you don't exist for that person.

Google says visitors who arrive from AI Overviews tend to spend more time on the site. It doesn't publish numbers, so we treat that as a direction, not a promise.

Google: same rules, no shortcuts

In its documentation for site owners, Google says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. The page has to be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet in regular Search. That's it.

The rest is the SEO you already know: useful content written for people, a page that loads well, crawlers allowed in, and structured data that matches the visible text. Anyone selling you "special AI Overviews optimization" through hidden code is selling something Google says you don't need.

ChatGPT and the others: let the crawlers in

OpenAI runs two separate crawlers. OAI-SearchBot surfaces websites in ChatGPT's search results. GPTBot collects text for model training. You can treat them differently in robots.txt. If you block OAI-SearchBot, OpenAI states plainly that your site won't show up in ChatGPT search answers.

Worth checking. Some businesses have blocked "anything AI" through a hosting setting or a security plugin without realizing it.

The llms.txt file is a proposal published in September 2024, not an adopted standard. Having one doesn't hurt, but it isn't why anyone recommends you.

What to actually fix

1. A page that answers questions. What you do, where, for whom, your hours, how to book. Plain language, built around the questions customers ask you on the phone.
2. The same details everywhere. Google wants your Business Profile name to match the one on your storefront, website and stationery, with a precise address and a phone number for that location. Keep the same name, address and phone on your site, your Google profile, Facebook and directories. An old address left on one directory confuses any system that cross-checks sources.
3. Mentions from elsewhere. Reviews, local articles, "where to eat in…" lists. It's easier to get recommended when other people say what you say.
4. Correct structured data. Business type, address and hours in the code, matching what's on the page.

How to check whether it's working

Ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity the questions a customer would ask: "best… near…", "where can I find… open on Sunday". Write down who shows up and what's said about you. Repeat every month.

Answers change from one day to the next, even for the same question. Look at the trend over a few months, not at a single reply.

Nobody controls what an AI assistant says. Anyone who guarantees you'll be recommended isn't telling the truth. What you can do is give the assistant every reason to pick you and check regularly whether it does. Our AI SEO page walks through the steps we follow.