A customer who once searched “best plumber near me” and scrolled through ten links now often asks ChatGPT, or reads the AI summary at the top of Google, and goes with what it says. If your business isn’t named in that answer, they may never see your website. Most owners have no idea whether theirs comes up.
This two-part guide covers how AI search works, what it changes for a small business, and how to check where you stand. Part 1 explains how it works and what matters. Part 2 covers how to check whether your business shows up and what to fix when it doesn’t.
Let’s start with how these answers get built.
Understand What AI Search Actually Is
AI search answers the question instead of handing over a list of links. When someone asks ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, or Google’s AI Mode for a recommendation, the system reads from several sources, writes one response, and names or links to a handful of them. If your business isn’t among those, the customer gets a complete answer that doesn’t include you.
You’ll hear about three versions.
- ChatGPT search is OpenAI’s chatbot pulling current information from the web and linking to what it used.
- AI Overviews are short summaries at the top of a regular Google results page.
- AI Mode is a conversational version of Google search, where the customer asks follow-up questions and gets longer, more detailed answers.
You’ll also run into GEO, short for generative engine optimization, and AEO, short for answer engine optimization. Both describe the work of getting your business named in AI answers, and people use them loosely, so you can treat them as two names for the same idea.
One more term explains how these answers get built. Behind the scenes, the AI often breaks a single question into several smaller searches, a technique called query fan-out. Someone asking for the best accountant for a small restaurant might trigger separate searches on pricing, restaurant bookkeeping, and tax deadlines. That means a page can get cited for a question you never targeted, as long as it answers one piece of it well.
That’s what makes AI search different to track. The same question can produce different answers for different people, so there’s no page one to check and no fixed position to climb. Whether you’re named depends on how well your site and your reputation answer the question a customer asks, and that’s something you can test.
Know What Changes and What Doesn’t
Optimizing for AI search is mostly the same work as optimizing for regular search. Google’s own guide for site owners says AI Overviews and AI Mode are rooted in its core search ranking systems, and that no special optimization is required to appear in them. The pages that do well in regular search are the pages these features pull in.
That includes the labels. Google says “GEO” and “AEO” describe work that, from its perspective, is still SEO, and it advises checking any third-party advice or services against its own guidance. Plenty of what’s being sold right now as AI optimization is ordinary search work under a new name.
Google’s guide lists several tactics you can skip.
- Skip the llms.txt file. It’s a file meant to point AI tools to your content, and Google Search ignores it. Keeping one won’t hurt, but it won’t help your Google visibility either.
- Skip the separate markdown pages. Writing a second version of your site for AI tools isn’t required.
- Skip chopping your content into tiny chunks. Google says there’s no ideal page length. Short and long pages both work, so build them for your customer.
- Skip rewriting your pages for AI. Google says its systems understand synonyms and general meaning, so you don’t need to cover every variation of a question or write in a special style.
- Skip special structured data. That’s code that labels details on a page for machines. It still helps you qualify for rich results in regular search, but AI features don’t require a special version.
What matters is the basics. To appear as a supporting link, a page has to be indexed, meaning Google knows it exists and has stored it, and eligible to show a snippet, the preview text under a result. If your site isn’t getting indexed, Part 1 of our SEO checklist covers how to fix that, and Part 3 explains why there’s no separate AI strategy to buy.
Past the basics, Google points to one thing above the rest: content that’s unique and useful, with a point of view that comes from experience. A first-hand account of a job you did beats a summary of what everyone else has already written.
One caution applies here. Writing a separate page for every variation of a question, just to show up in AI answers, goes against Google’s spam policy on scaled content. A larger pile of pages doesn’t make a site better.
One study of generative search found that content optimized for it could boost its visibility by up to 40%. That’s a promising result from research, not a guarantee, and the optimizations it tested are the same kind of clarity and credibility work the rest of this guide covers.
Google’s guidance applies to Google’s AI features. ChatGPT and other assistants run on their own systems, so no single rulebook covers all of them. Pages that are clear, accurate, and easy to find are the safest bet everywhere, and they happen to be the ones that serve a customer best.
Tell AI Overviews and AI Mode Apart
AI Overviews and AI Mode both live inside Google, but they do different jobs. An AI Overview is a short summary at the top of the results page, meant to give someone the gist of a question quickly. Google says it only shows one when a summary adds something beyond the regular results, so plenty of searches don’t get one.
AI Mode is built for questions that call for more exploring, reasoning, or comparing, and the customer can keep asking follow-ups. Its answers run about four times longer than an AI Overview’s, according to a study by Ahrefs, an SEO software company.
The two can agree on an answer and still point to different sources. Ahrefs compared roughly 730,000 pairs of answers from September 2025 and found that they said essentially the same thing, judged by meaning, about 86% of the time. They cited the same web pages just 13.7% of the time.
Think of two experts giving a customer the same advice while recommending different books. Google says each feature may use its own models and techniques, which is why the links it shows can differ.
Showing up in one doesn’t guarantee the other. If your business is mentioned in an AI Overview, Ahrefs found a 61% chance it also appears in the AI Mode answer to the same question. AI Mode names more businesses and people per answer, though, about 3.3 on average compared with 1.3 for an AI Overview, so you’d be sharing that answer with more competitors.
Plenty of answers don’t name a business at all. Ahrefs found that 59% of AI Overviews mentioned no brand or person.
A customer who wants a quick answer and one who settles in for a long back-and-forth can come away with two different shortlists. That’s why the checks in Part 2 cover both.
Find Out Where Your Business Stands
Knowing how AI search works only helps once you know how it treats your business. Everything above explains how these answers get built. It doesn’t tell you whether yours names you, describes you correctly, or sends anyone to your website.
Part 2 of this guide covers that. It walks through a monthly check using the questions your customers ask, Google’s Search Console, and Google Analytics 4, then what to fix when your business is missing, described incorrectly, or passed over for a competitor.