You asked ChatGPT, or Google's AI Overview, or Copilot, for a recommendation in your line of work and your town. It named three competitors and not you. Or a customer told you they asked an AI assistant and it had never heard of you.
There's a whole industry now selling "AEO" and "GEO" packages to fix this. Before you spend anything, there are four free checks that rule out the most common causes, and some of them take five minutes.
The quick answer
- Ask the assistants yourself, the way a customer would, and write down what they say.
- Check your Google Business Profile is complete, because local questions lean heavily on it.
- Check you aren't blocking the AI search tools you want, in robots.txt, your website firewall, or a Search Console setting.
- Check you're in Bing, because Microsoft Copilot gets its web results from Bing.
If all four pass and you still don't show up, the rest of this post covers what actually moves the needle, and what the research says (briefly, with links).
Check 1: Ask the assistants directly
Open ChatGPT, Google (look for the AI Overview or AI Mode), Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity, and ask the question a customer would ask:
- "Who does [your service] in [your town]?"
- "What's a good [your trade] near [your town] for a small business?"
- "What do you know about [your business name] in [your town]?"
Write down who gets named and which websites are linked as sources. Ask each one two or three times, on different days if you can, because the answers change from run to run.
What you're looking for:
- They know you by name but don't recommend you: you exist to them, but other sites talk about your competitors more.
- They don't know you at all: start with Checks 3 and 4, then the third-party mentions section below.
- They get your details wrong (old address, wrong hours, a service you don't offer): find the source they link to and fix it there. It's often an old directory listing.
- The sources are directories, review sites or forums rather than business websites: that tells you where you need to be listed, not just what your website should say.
Check 2: Is your Google Business Profile complete?
For "who does this near me" questions, local listings carry a lot of weight. Google's own local ranking help page says local results are based mainly on relevance, distance and popularity, and that "businesses with complete and accurate info are more likely to show up in local search results." It also says more reviews and positive ratings can help.
To check yours, go to business.google.com, sign in with the Google account that owns the profile, and select Edit profile (Google's steps). Make sure you have:
- The right primary category, plus any secondary categories that genuinely apply.
- Address or service area, phone, website and hours, all current.
- A description that says plainly what you do and where.
- Services listed individually, not just one line.
- Recent reviews, with your replies.
Then make sure your name, address and phone number match on your website and the main directories in your field. Mismatched details are exactly the kind of thing that ends up repeated wrong in an AI answer. Our Google Business Profile guide goes through the profile in detail.
Check 3: Are you blocking the tools you want?
AI companies use their own automated programs (crawlers, or "bots") to read websites. Your site controls them through robots.txt, a plain text file at yourbusiness.com/robots.txt, and through any firewall or bot-protection setting on your hosting or CDN. Plenty of sites block these bots without anyone having decided to: a security plugin added a rule, or a template robots.txt was copied years ago.
The catch is that each company runs more than one bot, and they do different jobs. Blocking the training bot and blocking the search bot are very different decisions.
What each name controls (checked October 2026)
Google:
- Googlebot is the normal Google Search crawler. Google's AI features documentation says robots.txt rules for Googlebot are the control for Search, and AI Overviews and AI Mode have no extra technical requirements: a page needs to be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet. Block Googlebot and you're out of Search, AI features included.
- Google-Extended is not a crawler. Google's crawler documentation calls it a "standalone product token" in robots.txt: Google crawls with its normal user agents and reads this token as an instruction. It controls whether your content is used to train Gemini models and to ground answers in Gemini Apps and Vertex AI. Google says it "does not impact a site's inclusion in Google Search nor is it used as a ranking signal."
- Search Console setting. Google also has a per-site switch: in Search Console, Settings > Search generative AI. Google's help page for the control says the default is "Include my site's links and content in Search generative AI features." Check nobody has switched it to Exclude.
OpenAI (OpenAI's crawler documentation):
- OAI-SearchBot finds sites for ChatGPT's search features. OpenAI says sites that block it "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers." This is the one to allow if you want to appear.
- GPTBot collects content that may be used to train OpenAI's models. Blocking it is a training opt-out.
- ChatGPT-User visits a page when a user asks ChatGPT to. OpenAI says robots.txt rules may not apply because a person started the request, and that it isn't used to decide what appears in search.
Anthropic (Anthropic's help article):
- ClaudeBot collects content that could be used for model training.
- Claude-SearchBot indexes content for Claude's search results. Blocking it can reduce your visibility there.
- Claude-User fetches pages when a Claude user asks a question.
Perplexity (Perplexity's crawler documentation):
- PerplexityBot surfaces and links websites in Perplexity's answers, and Perplexity says it isn't used to train AI models.
- Perplexity-User fetches pages when a user asks, and Perplexity says it generally ignores robots.txt for those requests.
A sensible middle position
If you want to appear in AI search answers but don't want your content used for training, a robots.txt along these lines does that. Keep whatever rules your site already has for its own folders.
# Allow AI search tools to find and cite the site
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /
User-agent: Claude-SearchBot
Allow: /
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /
# Opt out of AI model training
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /
User-agent: ClaudeBot
Disallow: /
User-agent: Google-Extended
Disallow: /Blocking Google-Extended also stops your content being used to ground answers in the Gemini app, so leave that one out if Gemini visibility matters more to you than training. Either way, it doesn't touch Google Search or AI Overviews.
Check your firewall too
robots.txt is a request; a firewall is a wall. If your site sits behind Cloudflare, look at Security Settings > Configure AI bot policies. Cloudflare's documentation says that from September 15, 2026, new domains default to blocking bots classified as Training or Agent on pages that show ads, while Search bots stay allowed. Older sites may have had the separate Block AI bots setting switched on, which Cloudflare is now retiring. WordPress security plugins and other hosts have their own bot rules, so check those too.
Check 4: Are you in Bing?
Microsoft's documentation says Copilot sends search queries to the Bing search service to ground its answers in current web information. If Bing hasn't indexed your site, Copilot's web answers can't point to it.
Two quick checks:
- Search Bing for
site:yourbusiness.com. If nothing comes up, Bing probably doesn't have you. - Set up Bing Webmaster Tools. It's free, it's Bing's equivalent of Google Search Console, and it can import a site you've already verified in Search Console, which saves redoing the verification. Submit your sitemap there.
Bing Webmaster Tools also added an AI Performance report in early 2026, in preview, that shows when Copilot and Bing's AI answers cite your pages.
Everything passes and you're still not mentioned
Then it's not a technical problem, and the fix is slower. Google's own guide to optimizing for generative AI search is blunt: from its point of view, optimizing for AI search "is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO." It says you don't need special AI text files like llms.txt (Google Search ignores them), and it tells you to skip "AEO/GEO hacks" and inauthentic mentions in favor of unique, expert-led content.
What tends to work for a small local business:
- Get mentioned on sites you don't own. AI answers often cite directories, review sites, local news and forums rather than business websites. Industry directories, your chamber of commerce, supplier and partner pages, professional associations and genuine customer reviews are all third-party mentions you can legitimately earn.
- Go deep on one narrow topic. Not "we do HVAC", but the specific problem you solve better than anyone in your county, covered well enough that a reader needs nothing else. First-hand detail is exactly what Google's guide says helps content stand out.
- Answer questions in public, as yourself. Local groups and industry forums welcome real answers from people who disclose who they are. Posting fake recommendations of your own business on Reddit or anywhere else breaks those sites' rules and tends to get found out.
- Keep the fundamentals in order. A site Google can read and trust is still the base. Our posts on E-E-A-T and Search Console cover the parts that matter most.
To measure it, Search Console now has Search Generative AI performance reports. Google announced them in June 2026 and says they rolled out to all sites by August 31, 2026. They show impressions in AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover's AI features, broken down by page, country, device and date. Check them before and after any change.
What the research says
Fewer numbers, but ones you can check:
- AI summaries reduce clicks. Pew Research Center tracked the real browsing of 900 US adults in March 2025. When a Google AI summary appeared, people clicked a regular search result in 8% of visits, against 15% when there was none. They clicked a link inside the summary in 1% of visits. That's early data, but it's the best independent measurement available, and it's a good reason to treat AI visibility as being named, not as a traffic source.
- Most topics have no clear winner yet. A Semrush study of 1,094 US categories in ChatGPT from January to June 2026 found a clear "owner" brand in only 15.2% of categories, an emerging leader in 31.2%, and no consistent brand in 53.7%. Traditional domain-level SEO metrics predicted which brand owned a category only about half the time. It's a vendor study and measures mentions, not sales, but it suggests that in most niches the spot is still open.
Be wary of anyone quoting much more precise figures about AI citations without a link to the method.
When to get help
- The checks show something blocking AI or search bots and you don't know where the rule lives (hosting, CDN, plugin).
- Assistants repeat wrong information about your business and you can't find the source.
- You're being quoted for an AEO or GEO package and want a second opinion on whether it covers anything beyond the free checks above.
If you'd like us to run these checks with you, our SEO and marketing page explains how we help.
