Most business owners think getting mentioned by ChatGPT or Google’s AI Overview is some kind of black box. Magic. Reserved for the Amazons and Home Depots of the world. That’s wrong.
I’ve seen small, local, unglamorous businesses show up in AI answers while their bigger, better-funded competitors don’t. It’s not luck and it’s not their SEO budget. It comes down to three specific things, and almost none of it is hard.
Here’s how to get cited in AI search results—what to do to your website, your Google Business Profile (GBP), and your content so that when someone asks ChatGPT or Google’s AI “who’s the best in my city,” your name comes up.
Why This Is Urgent Now
Let me tell you what happened with a client of mine recently. He runs a service business—small team, good local reputation, nothing huge. One afternoon he opened ChatGPT, not for work, just messing around, and typed in something like “what’s the best company for [his industry] in [his city].” His company came up. First name mentioned. He didn’t pay for it, didn’t know it was coming, and was honestly shocked. He messaged me that night, and my response was basically: yeah, that’s what happens when you do the basics right.
Here’s why this matters right now. According to a Semrush study that analyzed over 10 million keywords, AI Overviews jumped from appearing on 6.49% of queries in January 2025 to as high as 25% by mid-year, settling near 15.7%. And early in 2025, 91% of AI Overview queries were informational—by October that had dropped to about 57%, meaning commercial and buying-intent searches are now a big chunk of AI answers. (Semrush AI Overviews Study, via ContentGrip)
Translation: AI isn’t just answering homework questions anymore. It’s answering “who should I hire” questions. If you’re not in that answer, you don’t exist to that buyer. The good news is there are three things you can actually do about it.
1. Answer Real Questions on Your Website (The Way AI Can Read Them)
This is where it all starts. AI crawls the web looking for clear, direct answers to the questions people are asking, then pulls those answers—and the sources—into its response. So, the question is simple: Is your website actually answering the questions your customers ask?
Here’s where most businesses go wrong. They have a services page that says, “we provide excellent service.” That’s not an answer. That’s marketing fluff, and AI skips it. What gets you cited is content structured as a question and a direct answer.
- Make a list of the 5 to 10 questions your customers actually ask before they hire you. Not what you think they should ask—the real ones, from your inbox, your phone, your sales calls.
- For each question, create a page or section where the heading is the exact question, like “How much does a kitchen renovation cost in Toronto?”
- Answer the question in the first sentence. No preamble, no story about 1987. Just the answer, then use the rest of the page for detail.
- At the bottom of the page, add a short “Quick Summary” or “Key Takeaways” box with 2 or 3 bullet points. That’s the exact kind of snippet AI loves to pull.
One thing that sounds obvious but isn’t: if you run a plumbing business in Mississauga, your answer needs to actually say “in Mississauga.” If you’re an accountant for dental practices, the page needs to say “for dental practices.” AI is literal. It matches your content to the question, so if the question is location- or industry-specific, your answer has to be, too. And you don’t have to write ten pages this weekend. Start with two, do them really well, then write two more next month. In six months, you’ve got twelve pages of genuinely useful content and a real head start on your competition.
2. Make Your Google Business Profile Impossible to Ignore
When AI assistants and search engines want to figure out who’s legit in a local market, they lean heavily on structured data. And your Google Business Profile is the biggest, cleanest source of structured data about your business on the entire internet.
If your GBP is half-built and abandoned, you’re invisible to AI. If it’s fully filled out, regularly updated, and backed by real reviews and real photos, you look like the most trusted business in your category—and that’s what AI gravitates toward. Here are the non-negotiables for AI visibility specifically:
- Fill out every single field. Not the important ones—every single one. Business category, secondary categories, services, products, description, hours, attributes. AI reads all of it.
- List every service you offer individually. Not “consulting services”—list the 8 specific things you do. Each one is another signal about what you actually offer.
- Keep reviews coming consistently. Not a burst of 50 in one week—a steady flow. Even 3 or 4 new reviews a month signals your business is alive and active.
- Post to your GBP weekly. A photo of a recent job, a quick tip, an offer. Five minutes, once a week.
- Make sure your business name, address, and phone number are exactly the same on your GBP, your website, and every directory you’re listed on. AI cross-references these, and any mismatch creates doubt.
Here’s what most people miss. GBP isn’t just for Google Maps anymore. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini are all pulling signals from these kinds of structured sources. When you optimize your GBP, you’re feeding the entire AI ecosystem. I’ve watched businesses with tiny websites get cited over businesses with huge, fancy ones, because the smaller business had a rock-solid GBP and the bigger one had neglected theirs. AI doesn’t care how pretty your site is. It cares about the signals.
3. Get Mentioned Where AI Is Already Looking
This is the one most people don’t think about at all. You can have a perfect website and a perfect GBP, but if your business only exists on your own domain, AI treats that as a ceiling—because it’s smart enough to know that what you say about yourself isn’t as trustworthy as what other people say about you.
So, the third move is making sure your business is being mentioned, reviewed, and discussed in places beyond your own website. This is what separates businesses that get cited from businesses that don’t.
- Get on the major review platforms. Google, yes, but also Yelp, the Better Business Bureau, industry-specific directories, and whichever platforms your customers actually use. AI reads all of them.
- Participate in online communities in your industry—Reddit threads, Facebook groups, niche forums. Not as a spammer, as an actual helpful contributor. When you genuinely help people, your name gets mentioned, and AI notices independent mentions.
- Pitch yourself for industry articles, podcasts, and “best of” lists. You don’t need national TV. Local business journals, industry blogs, and niche podcasts are gold because AI reads those sources constantly.
- Ask happy clients if they’d share their experience publicly—a LinkedIn post, a short video testimonial, a quote on their own blog. Earned mentions from real people carry enormous weight.
The underlying idea: Your own website makes you visible, but everything else makes you credible. AI is specifically designed to weigh credibility heavily, because its whole job is to give the user a trustworthy answer, not the first answer.
Where to Start
Three things, that’s it. Answer the real questions your customers are asking, right on your website, in a format AI can easily read. Treat your Google Business Profile like the business asset it is—complete it, feed it, maintain it. And build a presence beyond your own domain through reviews, communities, and earned mentions.
One more myth to bust before you go. There’s a belief that getting cited in AI takes a massive content team, a fancy PR firm, and a five-figure monthly budget. It doesn’t. The client I mentioned at the top of this had none of that. He had a clean website, a well-maintained GBP, and a good local digital marketing agency working for him. That was enough.
The window right now is wide open. Most of your competitors haven’t figured this out yet. A few months of consistent work on these three things and your name starts showing up in places you didn’t expect. The first step is just knowing where you stand today—which is exactly what a critique is for.
Critique My Website—get a straight, honest look at whether your site and profile are built to get cited by AI, and where to start.
