How to Get Your Business Into AI Search Results

People are no longer just searching for businesses on Google. They’re asking AI which businesses they should consider. Here’s how to give your business a better chance of being part of those answers.

If someone searches Google for your business, you probably have a pretty good idea what you want to happen. You want your website to show up, you want your Google Business Profile to appear when appropriate, and you want the right pages to rank for the searches that matter to your business. AI search changes the question a little. Someone can now ask ChatGPT, Google AI, Perplexity, Gemini or another AI-powered search system something like, “Who are the best web design companies in Denver?” or “What company should I use to build a website for a medical practice in Colorado?” Instead of returning a traditional list of blue links, the system may assemble information from multiple sources and mention particular businesses directly.

So how do you get your business into that conversation?

There is no magic “AI ranking” button, and there is no legitimate trick that guarantees an AI system will mention your company. Google’s current guidance continues to point back to the fundamentals of good SEO while emphasizing useful, original content for its generative AI search experiences. OpenAI likewise says that public websites can appear in ChatGPT search and that sites need to be accessible to its search crawler to be eligible for inclusion. Google Search Central The good news is that the things that make a business easier for AI to understand are often the same things that make a website better for Google and, more importantly, better for the people who are actually looking for the business.

Start by Making It Obvious What Your Business Does

This sounds almost too simple, but it is one of the biggest problems I see on business websites. A company knows exactly what it does. Its owner knows. Its employees know. Its customers may know. But does the website make it obvious? If the homepage says something vague like “We create better digital experiences,” an AI system has to figure out what that actually means. Are you a web design company, a branding agency, a software company or a marketing firm? Do you work with local businesses, enterprise companies, restaurants, contractors or medical practices?

The more clearly your website establishes who you are, what you do, where you do it and who you do it for, the easier it becomes for search systems to connect your business with relevant questions. That doesn’t mean stuffing your homepage with every keyword you can think of. It means saying what you actually do in plain language and making sure your business name, primary services, locations, specialties and other important information are consistent throughout the site. This is one reason website architecture and SEO cannot really be separated. If the website doesn’t clearly communicate what the business is about, adding another hundred keywords isn’t going to fix the underlying problem.

Build Pages Around the Things People Actually Ask

One of the easiest ways to make a business more useful to AI search is also one of the oldest SEO strategies around: answer questions. But don’t create questions because an SEO tool gave you a list of them. Create pages because your customers actually ask them.

A Denver business owner might ask who does web design in Denver, how much a business website costs, whether SEO should happen before a website is built, how long a website takes to build, whether AI can build a website, or why a website isn’t showing up on Google. Those aren’t just keywords. They are questions representing different stages of a buying decision. A strong website can answer them through service pages, detailed articles, FAQs, case studies and other useful content. The format matters less than whether the page genuinely answers the question.

That’s why the existing BOP article Do I Need SEO Before, During, or After My Website Is Built? fits naturally into this strategy. It answers a real business question instead of simply targeting a keyword. Google’s current guidance for generative AI features likewise continues to emphasize useful, original content alongside established SEO fundamentals. Google Search Central

Don’t Put Everything on One Page

This is where website structure becomes important. If your company offers web design, SEO, branding, ecommerce development and website maintenance, you could theoretically put all of that on one enormous page. I wouldn’t. Important services should have their own pages, and genuine expertise in particular industries or markets can support additional useful content.

A business might have separate areas for web design and SEO, with more specific pages underneath those services, along with industry-specific content for medical practices, construction companies or professional services. The exact structure depends on the business, but the principle is straightforward: create a structure that reflects the actual business rather than creating pages simply because a keyword tool says you should. A clear structure gives search engines more context and gives AI systems more individual pieces of information to work with.

Connect Your Pages With Internal Links

This is one of the most overlooked parts of the whole process. You can have excellent pages sitting on your website and still make it harder for search engines to understand how those pages relate to one another. Internal links establish those relationships.

An article about local SEO should connect to the appropriate Denver SEO services page. An article about website architecture should connect to relevant web design content. An article about AI search should connect to related AI, SEO and website strategy content. Done properly, this creates something much more meaningful than a collection of disconnected blog posts. It creates a network of related information that helps establish relationships between concepts, services, questions and expertise.

That’s one reason a content strategy becomes much more powerful than simply publishing more blogs. The individual articles support the important service pages, while the service pages give the articles somewhere meaningful to lead the reader.

Establish Your Business Beyond Your Own Website

Your website is important, but it isn’t the only source of information about your company. AI search can draw on information from across the web, and ChatGPT search provides links to web sources when constructing answers. OpenAI says public websites can appear in ChatGPT search and provides guidance for publishers about allowing its search crawler to access their content. OpenAI — Publishers and Developers FAQ

That means your business should make sense outside your own domain too. Your Google Business Profile should accurately represent the business. Important business directories should be consistent. Industry associations, legitimate professional organizations, local organizations, publications, partners, clients and other credible third-party sources can all contribute to the broader picture of who your company is and what it does.

This is also why I wouldn’t think about external links purely as an old-fashioned “SEO juice” exercise. A credible third-party mention can provide useful context about a business, while a dozen random directory links don’t necessarily accomplish the same thing. The goal isn’t to manufacture a giant footprint. The goal is to establish a believable one.

Earn Mentions That Actually Mean Something

This is where a lot of AI-search advice goes off the rails. There is already a cottage industry built around the idea that businesses can manufacture enough “citations” or mentions to make AI systems recommend them. I wouldn’t approach it that way.

If you’re a web design company, being mentioned by a legitimate business publication, industry organization, local organization, client, partner or relevant professional resource makes considerably more sense than paying for hundreds of irrelevant mentions. The same principle applies to links. A link from a page that has nothing to do with your business may technically be a link, but it doesn’t necessarily establish meaningful context.

Relevance matters, the credibility of the source matters, and whether the mention is actually useful to a human matters. The objective isn’t to manufacture signals for a machine. It is to build a legitimate body of information about your business that exists both on and beyond your own website.

Make Your Important Information Easy to Crawl

There is also a very unglamorous technical part of AI visibility that gets overlooked because it isn’t nearly as exciting as talking about prompts and artificial intelligence. Your website has to be accessible. If important pages are blocked from crawling, hidden behind technical barriers, poorly linked, inaccessible to search engines or accidentally marked noindex, you’ve created a problem before AI gets anywhere near your content.

For ChatGPT specifically, OpenAI says websites need to allow OAI-SearchBot to crawl their content in order to be eligible for inclusion in ChatGPT search, and it notes that hosting providers and CDNs need to allow the crawler’s traffic through. OpenAI — Publishers and Developers FAQ So check the basics: robots.txt, important page indexing, Search Console, crawl errors, redirects, canonical tags and whether your important content is actually available in a form search systems can process.

This is also where broader SEO work matters. A site can have brilliant content and still underperform if technical problems prevent search engines from consistently accessing, understanding or indexing it.

Use Structured Data Where It Makes Sense

Structured data can help search engines understand what a page represents, and Google explains that appropriate structured data can help it understand page content and make pages eligible for certain search features. Google Search Central — Structured Data That doesn’t mean adding every schema type you can find. It means using appropriate structured data when it accurately describes the content.

A business should have accurate business information, an article should be represented as an article, and a product should be represented as a product. Schema isn’t a substitute for good content and it isn’t a shortcut into AI results. It is another way of communicating what the content already says, which is why accuracy matters more than trying to attach every possible piece of markup to a page.

Create Content That Adds Something

This may be the biggest piece of the puzzle. If your website contains the same generic information that appears on a thousand other websites, there isn’t much reason for an AI system to use your page as a source. You need something to contribute. That could be experience, original research, examples, local knowledge, case studies, an explanation that makes a complicated subject easier to understand, or a genuinely useful answer to a question that competitors have handled badly.

This is where a company’s actual expertise becomes an SEO asset. If you’ve been building websites for twenty years, you’ve seen things that someone writing a generic article about web design from an AI-generated outline hasn’t seen. Use that experience. Explain what actually happens, talk about mistakes you’ve seen, show examples, explain tradeoffs and tell people what doesn’t work. That’s the kind of information that makes a page different from another generic page on the same subject.

Don’t Try to Trick AI Into Mentioning You

This deserves its own section because there is already a cottage industry forming around “AI optimization hacks.” Be careful. There is no reliable formula where you repeat your company name fifty times,
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