How to show up in AI search (ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews)
AI tools have changed what “being found online” means. People used to search, scan a list of links, and click. Now a growing share of them ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Google’s AI Overviews a question and read the answer without clicking anything at all.
That’s a problem if your website was built to win clicks. It’s an opportunity if you give these tools content worth quoting.
Why AI tools quote some pages and ignore others
AI models don’t reward the old tricks. Keyword density, thin pages padded for length, vague marketing copy: none of it helps, and some actively hurts. What these tools look for is a clear, confident answer they can lift and attribute.
Three things make a page quotable:
- It answers a real question directly. Not “our solutions empower your journey” — an actual answer to something a person would type or say.
- It’s structured so a machine can parse it. Plain headings, short paragraphs, a clear answer near the top, FAQ sections for the obvious follow-ups.
- It’s specific. Concrete numbers, named examples and real detail signal that a human who knows the subject wrote it.
What to actually do
Start with the questions your customers ask. Write a page that answers each one properly — lead with the answer, then explain it. Keep the language plain. Add an FAQ section for the natural follow-ups. Where structured data fits (an FAQ, a how-to, a local business), add it, because it removes ambiguity for the machine.
Then keep your traditional SEO in good order. A site AI tools can’t crawl is a site they can’t quote. The two jobs support each other.
The short version
Write like you’re explaining something to a smart person who’s in a hurry, structure it so software can read it without guessing, and be specific enough that it’s obviously worth trusting. That’s most of AI search.
If you’d rather not work through all of that yourself, helping small businesses get found in AI search is exactly what I do. Take a look at AI Optimisation, or get in touch and we’ll go through your site together.
Frequently asked questions
Is AI search different from normal SEO?
They overlap, but they're not the same. SEO is about ranking in a list of links. AI search is about being the source an AI tool quotes when it answers a question directly. Good SEO foundations help, but AI tools reward clarity and structure even more heavily.
Do I need to do anything technical to appear in AI Overviews?
The basics matter: a crawlable site, sensible headings, fast pages, structured data where it fits. Beyond that, the biggest lever is the writing itself: answer the question plainly, near the top, in language a machine can lift without guessing.
How long does it take to show up in AI answers?
There's no fixed timeline. AI tools refresh their sources at different rates than Google crawls, so it's usually weeks to a few months rather than days — and it depends on how often the tools re-index and how genuinely quotable your pages are. Anyone quoting you an exact date is guessing.