What Is AI Search Optimization?
When you search for something online — a place, a business, a person — the results you see are shaped by SEO, or search engine optimization. It’s the set of best practices that helps a website show up in results instead of getting buried by a competitor who put more thought into their page content.
AI search results are newer territory. Not brand new, but not old either. And the way AI decides what to surface in chat sessions, like with ChatGPT or Perplexity, isn’t driven by SEO alone. There are additional techniques that can influence whether AI chooses your website over someone else’s.
What You’ll Need Before We Start
Before any files get implemented, there are a few things that need to be solid first. Your business category, your exact name, address, and phone number, and a clear picture of what services you actually want to be found for. These details become the foundation of everything. If they’re inconsistent across various business platforms, or vague, the optimization has nothing solid to build on.
It’s essential to have a SEO ready website already working in your favor. The AI optimization files are most effective when they’re backed by a site that’s already structured, organized, and sending the right signals to search engines. One complements the other.
Before and After
A client came to me to help implement basic SEO — reformatting their content to make search engines happy. I offered to go a step further and optimize their AI search data at the same time.
Before optimization, the client wasn’t consistently surfacing for the services they offer. After optimization, the results spoke for themselves. On Perplexity, the client came up as the #1 result in the sidebar for a service they offer, with their correct star rating and a citation linking directly to their site.
I noticed a separate issue where ChatGPT was pulling a Yelp rating for them that was significantly lower than their actual Google rating. Here’s something most small business owners don’t know: ChatGPT can’t access your Google reviews since Google keeps that data behind its own wall and doesn’t share it with outside platforms. So when someone asks ChatGPT to recommend a business, it pulls from whatever third-party sources it can reach — which is why a Yelp rating might show up instead of your hard-earned Google rating.
What You Can Control (And What You Can’t)
AI search optimization isn’t a switch you flip. Once the work is done, you’re essentially making your best case to platforms like Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Gemini — and then waiting for them to catch up. Some do it faster than others.
What you can control: how your business information is structured, how consistent it is across the web, and how clearly your site communicates what you do and who you serve. That’s the work.
What you can’t control: exactly when each platform picks it up, how they choose to display it, or whether a third-party source like Yelp is muddying the waters. Those issues can be addressed, but they take time and sometimes ongoing attention.
The good news is that the foundation — once built correctly — tends to hold. And the businesses that do this now are ahead of the ones who haven’t thought about it yet.
Ready to Show Up in AI Search Results?
If you want your business ratings and rankings showing up in AI search results platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity among others, reach out and let’s get started.