A customer of yours opens ChatGPT and types, "Who's the best pest control company near me that handles termites?" ChatGPT gives them three names. You're not one of them. Your competitor down the road, the one with the worse reviews and the website from 2017, is.
You never see this happen. There's no lost-click report for it. The customer just calls someone else, and you spend the afternoon wondering why the phone's so quiet.
So how do you get your business recommended by ChatGPT? There's no special file or code that unlocks it, and you can't pay your way into the answer itself. ChatGPT and Google's AI answers pull from pages they can crawl and trust. The businesses that get named tend to have clear, crawlable pages that answer the exact question, consistent information about the business across the web, and content that shows they actually do the work.
ChatGPT does sell ads now, but they appear in a labeled box below the answer, and OpenAI says they don't influence what the answer says. More on that near the end. First, the things you can check on your own site this week.
There's no way to know for sure why an AI tool picked someone else. But these four problems are common, they're easy to check, and any one of them can keep you out of the answer.
OpenAI uses two different bots, and they do different jobs. According to its Publishers and Developers FAQ, OAI-SearchBot is what lets your pages show up with summaries and snippets in ChatGPT search. GPTBot is the one tied to training OpenAI's models.
If you, your developer or a security plugin ever added a rule to block "all the AI bots," OAI-SearchBot may have been caught up in it. If so, you've told ChatGPT search not to read your site. OpenAI's FAQ notes that a blocked page's link and title can still surface if ChatGPT finds the URL somewhere else, but it won't get the summary that makes someone want to click.
Check it this week: go to yourdomain.com/robots.txt in your browser. It's a plain text file and takes about 30 seconds to read. Look for "OAI-SearchBot" or a rule that blocks every user agent. If you see "Disallow: /" under OAI-SearchBot, you're blocking ChatGPT's search crawler from accessing your content, whether you meant to or not. You can block GPTBot and still allow OAI-SearchBot if you don't want your content used for training.
Look at your homepage. Does it say "Committed to Excellence Since 1998" and "Solutions Tailored to You"? Now ask yourself what question that answers.
None. That's a fortune cookie, not an answer.
Google describes AI Overviews and AI Mode as using "query fan-out," which means running several related searches across subtopics to build one answer. So when someone asks about termite treatment, the AI may also be looking up cost, how long it takes, whether it's safe for pets, and who services that area. Each of those is a chance for your page to be the one it pulls from, but only if you've actually written the answer down.
Say you run an HVAC company in Round Rock. A customer asks, "How much does it cost to replace an AC unit in Round Rock?" If your site has a page that gives a real price range, explains what drives it up or down, and says you serve Round Rock, you have something to quote. If your site says "Call for a free estimate," you don't.
Check it this week: write down the 10 questions your customers ask you on the phone most often. Then search your own site for the answer to each one. Every question you can't find a clear answer to is a question someone else's page may be answering for your customer.
Google's documentation lists making sure important content is available in textual form as a best practice. That sounds obvious until you look at how many small business sites put their service list in a graphic, their pricing in a scanned PDF, and their service area in a map image.
You can read those. A crawler may not get much from them.
Check it this week: open your services page, select all the text with your mouse, and paste it into a blank document. Whatever didn't paste is probably invisible to the AI too.
Google's AI features and your website page also recommends keeping your Google Business Profile information up to date. When a customer asks for a business "near me," your hours, address, categories and services matter.
Here's a common mess: your Google Business Profile says you close at 5, your website says 6, and a directory listing still shows the phone number you had three years ago. You've given the machine three versions of the truth. It has to pick one, and it has no idea which one you meant.
Check it this week: Google your business name. Compare your hours, phone, address and service list on your Business Profile, your website and the first two directories that show up. Fix every mismatch.
Everything above is basic SEO. Let crawlers in, answer real questions in text, keep your information consistent, link your pages to each other. Google says plainly that the same SEO best practices apply to its AI features. If you're skipping those, start there. They still matter.
What changed is how easy it is to produce the obvious answer. Anyone can open ChatGPT and have a page on "how much does AC replacement cost in Round Rock" written in 30 seconds. So can your competitor. So can the national lead-gen site that wants to sell your leads back to you.
When ten pages answer the same question with the same generic price range and the same five bullet points, there's not much reason to pick one over another. A page that includes something the others don't, usually something only you know, has a better shot at being useful, and being useful is the whole point. Google's own guide to optimizing for its generative AI features says the same thing: focus on valuable, unique, non-commodity content.
There's a lot of fear about this, so let's be specific. Google doesn't penalize a page because AI helped write it. Its guidance on generative AI content says AI can be useful for researching a topic and adding structure to original content. What it warns against is using AI to crank out lots of pages that don't add anything for the reader, which can fall under its spam policy on scaled content abuse.
A better test than "can anyone tell I used AI" is whether your page says anything that couldn't have been written without you.
AI can give you a decent first draft on termite treatment. It can't tell the reader:
That's the stuff that helps a customer make a decision. It's also what makes them trust you enough to call.
At The Viral Marketing Company, part of our content process is interviewing our clients' teams about recent interactions with customers. What questions came up? What did someone misunderstand? What made a particular problem difficult to solve, and how did you approach it?
Your techs probably know more than your website does. Nobody thinks of those conversations as website material. But they often contain the details your next customer needs: an explanation of why costs vary, a mistake they can avoid, or a practical example of how you handle a problem they're facing.
It's a more journalistic approach to creating content. Ask questions, follow up, check the details, and turn what you learn into something useful. AI can help organize and draft it, but the experience comes from the people doing the work.
I expect this approach to become more valuable as generic content gets easier to produce. Your team doesn't need to become a team of writers. They need someone who knows what to ask and can explain their answers clearly.
You can start without us. Pick one tech or whoever answers your phones, ask them what customers got confused about this month, and write that up as an answer. One real answer is worth more than five pages that could be on anyone's site.
Posting new content still matters, but not the way people usually mean it. Google says it has systems that favor fresher content for searches where that's expected, like news or anything that changes often. For a lot of local service questions, a good page from last year still holds up.
What goes stale is the detail. Prices from 2023. A service you don't offer anymore. A service area that doesn't include the suburb you've been working in all year. Hours that changed. Those are the things that make an AI answer wrong, and they're the first things to update.
So yes, keep publishing. Publish because you have something new to say, and fix the old pages while you're at it.
Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the work of getting your business cited or recommended when someone asks an AI tool like ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI Overviews a question. You'll also hear it called GEO or AI SEO.
In practice, most of it is SEO done properly. If your site has technical problems that keep Google from reading it, those same problems keep you out of AI answers.
What changes is how you write. A page built to get quoted has to answer a specific question directly, near the top, in a sentence that still makes sense if it's lifted out by itself. And it helps a lot if that sentence has something in it that only you could have written. That's also why knowing the exact questions your customers search matters more now. You can't answer a question you never found out people were asking.
You can see more than you could a year ago, but not all of it.
ChatGPT: OpenAI's FAQ says ChatGPT automatically adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to the links it sends people through. In Google Analytics, filter your traffic acquisition report by source for chatgpt.com. If it's zero, that's your baseline. If there are visits, look at which pages people landed on. Those pages are doing something right.
Google: Search Console now has a Generative AI performance report that shows how often your pages appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode. Google introduced it in June 2026 and has since opened it to all sites, though a site without many AI impressions may not see one yet. It's impressions only. It shows which pages showed up, but not clicks. Clicks from those features are still counted in your regular Performance report alongside everything else. So you can see whether you're showing up. You can't yet see cleanly what that's worth.
The low-tech test: open ChatGPT and ask the questions your customers would ask, the way they'd ask them, including your city. See who gets named. See what pages get linked. Then read those pages and compare them honestly to yours.
None of this tells you how many people asked an AI about you and then called without clicking anything. That part is still mostly invisible, which is why asking new customers how they found you is still worth doing.
ChatGPT has ads now. OpenAI started testing them early in 2026, opened a self-serve Ads Manager on May 5, 2026, and in October announced more measurement tools for advertisers. For most campaign types you can target by state, city, market or ZIP code, which makes them usable for a local business.
But the ad isn't the recommendation. OpenAI's help center says ads run on separate systems from the chat model and advertisers can't shape, rank or alter ChatGPT's responses. Ads sit below the answer, labeled as sponsored, and only people on the Free and Go plans see them. If your competitor is named in the answer and you're running an ad, the customer sees your competitor recommended and your ad underneath it.
It's also new. Nobody has much published data yet on what a ChatGPT ad click is worth for an HVAC company or a pest control company. Being early might help. It also might mean paying the tuition so everyone who shows up next year doesn't have to. If you test it, set a budget you're fine losing, target only the area you serve, tag your links, and judge it by cost per customer, not cost per click. If most of your leads come by phone, make sure you can tie calls back to the ad first.
And don't treat ads as the fix for not being recommended. That's still the work in the sections above.
No. You can buy ChatGPT ads, which show up in a labeled box below the answer for people on the Free and Go plans. OpenAI says ads don't influence what ChatGPT says in the answer itself.
Not for using AI. Google's guidance says AI can help with research and structure. The risk is publishing lots of pages that add nothing new, which can violate its scaled content abuse policy whether a person or a machine wrote them.
For Google, no. Google's documentation says you don't need new machine-readable files, AI text files or special schema.org markup to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. Structured data you already use should match what's visible on the page.
That depends on what you want. If you want to show up in ChatGPT search, don't block OAI-SearchBot. If you don't want your content used for model training, OpenAI's FAQ says to disallow GPTBot. You can do one without the other.
Nobody can promise you a timeline, and you should be skeptical of anyone who does. If an agency guarantees one, read how to evaluate a marketing agency before you sign anything. Your pages have to be crawled and indexed first. Start by checking crawler access and correcting inconsistent business information.
No. Google says the same SEO fundamentals apply to its AI features. AEO changes how you write and structure pages so they can be quoted, but a page Google can't index won't show up in its AI answers either.
Most owners don't. You've got a business to run, and robots.txt files and mismatched directory listings aren't where your afternoon should go.
Get a free SEO audit from The Viral Marketing Company. It's a manual review of your site covering organic search, local SEO and technical SEO, followed by a live walkthrough with you. You'll see where your site falls short and what to fix first.