Something interesting has been happening in my client meetings lately. Several clients have told me, almost giddy, that they just got a new customer who found them through ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. Not Google search. Not maps. Not a referral. But a generative AI chatbot.
A couple of years ago, that would have sounded strange. Now it’s becoming normal. And if you’re a small business owner who’s been focused on getting found on Google, it’s time to pay attention to what’s changing.
People are asking AI tools where to find services. They’re typing questions into Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and other tools, and getting answers that include specific business recommendations. Sometimes those answers link to a website. Sometimes they don’t. Either way, the AI is deciding which businesses to mention and which ones to skip.
Here’s something important to understand about how this works: AI tools get their information from a few sources. One of those sources is training data, the massive amount of content the AI was trained on, which can include information about your business from months or even years ago. That information is probably outdated. Another source is real-time search. When someone asks for a recommendation, the AI often runs a search engine query behind the scenes, looks at the results, and reads the pages it can access. That means your website needs to show up in search results for AI tools to find you right now, and the information about your business across the web needs to be accurate so the AI’s background knowledge isn’t working against you.
The good news? Some of the things that make AI tools notice your business are things you can control. And for small businesses in particular, there’s a real advantage here that most people haven’t caught on to yet.
Here are five things you can do right now to make sure AI tools can find you, understand you, and recommend you.
1. Write Content That Answers the Questions Your Customers Actually Ask
AI tools are built to answer questions. When someone asks ChatGPT “who is the best business coach for women in Maryland,” the AI runs a search, looks at the results, and scans the pages it finds for content that directly answers that question. It’s looking for specifics, not marketing fluff.
This is where a lot of small business websites fall short. A therapy practice whose services page says “we offer compassionate mental health services for your journey toward wellness” sounds warm, but it’s not specific enough.
Compare that to a page that says: “We offer compassionate, trauma-informed therapy for adults in Anne Arundel County. With convenient online and in-person appointments, we can help you on your journey toward wellness.”
That second version answers real questions. It names a location, a specialty, and session formats. An AI tool can work with that.
Here’s the thing: AI tools are evaluating hundreds of potential sources every time someone asks a question. They don’t spend time trying to decode what “comprehensive solutions” actually means. They move on to the site that spells it out. If your website doesn’t give them a clear, specific answer to match against the question, you’re not even in the running.
Think about the questions your customers ask when they call you or sit down for a consultation. Those are the questions your website should answer. Each service page and blog post is a chance to match what someone is searching for, and the more specific you get, the better your chances of being the business an AI tool recommends.
Here’s what a lot of coverage about AI search misses: these tools don’t favor the biggest brands. They favor the clearest, most relevant answer to a specific question. A therapist in Crofton who explains exactly which specialties she treats and which insurance she accepts will often beat a national mental health directory’s generic listing. An auto repair shop that lists every service it offers by name will outperform a big chain’s cookie-cutter website. That’s your advantage.
2. Structure Your Website So AI Can Actually Read It
AI tools don’t really care about how your website looks. They don’t admire your hero image or notice your color palette. They don’t care if your logo is big or small. Honestly, most people don’t either, but that’s a post for another time. In any event, AI tools scan for structure: headings, organized sections, and clearly labeled information.
I used to encourage my clients to write their own content, but then I’d often end up with a 15-page About page. No human is going to read all of that to figure out if they want to work with you, and even the AI tools are going to struggle to sift through all of that information to figure out if your business is what their user is looking for. Now? I write optimized, structured content for them, and since my clients are telling me they’re showing up in ChatGPT recommendations and getting cited in AI-generated answers, it seems to be working.
Here’s why that matters: AI tools can only process so much text at a time. When an AI tool finds your website in its search results and visits the page, it’s not reading every word. It grabs what it can, pulls out the parts that seem most relevant, and moves on. If your most important information is buried in paragraph twelve of an unstructured page, the AI might never get to it. A focused, well-organized page puts your best information where AI tools can actually find it.
So what can you do about it?
Use descriptive headings (H2s and H3s) that reflect what each section is actually about. Instead of a heading that says “Our Services,” try “Brake Repair and Replacement for Cars and Trucks in Crownsville.” The second one tells both AI tools and your human visitors exactly what they’re about to read. It also helps your page show up in search results for those specific terms, which is how AI tools find you in the first place.
Keep one main idea per paragraph. If you’re covering your process, your pricing, and your timeline in a single block of text, break those into separate sections with their own headings.
When you’re listing features, services, or steps, format them so they’re easy to scan. Lists and short, clear descriptions work better than walls of text for both AI extraction and human readability.
3. Make Your Content Easy for AI to Extract
AI tools aren’t just reading your website. They’re trying to extract specific pieces of information they can use to answer someone’s question. The easier you make that extraction, the more likely you are to get cited. Two things help with this more than almost anything else: FAQ sections and schema markup (which can include FAQs).
Why FAQs matter so much
When someone types a question into ChatGPT or Perplexity, the AI is literally looking for question-and-answer pairs to match against that query. A well-structured FAQ on your page gives the AI exactly what it needs: a question and a direct answer, neatly paired together, ready to pull from. Without an FAQ, the AI has to dig through your paragraphs and hope it can piece together an answer. With one, you’ve done the work for it.
FAQs also help with the search engine side of the equation. When your FAQ includes real questions people are searching for, those questions can help your page rank for those queries, which means AI tools are more likely to find your page when they search.
Every service page on your website should have an FAQ section. Your most important blog posts should, too. I usually also put one on the contact page. And the questions shouldn’t be ones you made up to fill space. They should be the real questions your customers ask you all the time.
If people constantly ask you “are your dresses machine-washable?” or “do you accept my insurance?” or “what should I bring to my first coaching session?” then those belong in your FAQ. AI tools pick up on those natural question-and-answer pairs, and when someone asks a similar question in ChatGPT or Perplexity, your FAQ answer has a shot at being the one that gets cited.
One thing to note: you should actually answer the questions in the FAQ. If the answer to “how long does an oil change take?” is a vague paragraph about “it depends on many factors,” that’s not useful to the AI or to your potential customer. Be direct. Give a real answer. That’s what gets cited.
Schema markup: the cheat sheet for AI
FAQs help AI extract answers from your content. Schema markup takes that a step further by tagging your content so AI tools and search engines can read it instantly, without having to interpret anything.
Schema markup is code you add to your website that says “here’s my business name, here’s my address, here are my services, here are my FAQs” in a structured format that machines are built to understand. Your visitors never see it, but search engines and AI tools absolutely do. Without schema markup, AI has to read your page and figure out what kind of business you are. With schema markup, you’re handing it a cheat sheet.
Schema markup also helps your content show up more accurately in search results, and since AI tools use those search results as their starting point, it gives you an edge at every stage of the process.
For small businesses, the most important types of schema include:
LocalBusiness, which establishes who you are, where you operate, and how to contact you. This is especially important if you serve a specific geographic area. There are also more-specific LocalBusiness schema, like AutoRepair, HVACBusiness, ChildCare, and Dentist.
Service, which identifies each specific service you provide. If you’re a nonprofit that runs after-school programs, mentoring, and community events, each one can be marked up individually so AI tools understand your full range of offerings.
FAQ, which tags your FAQ sections so AI tools and search engines recognize them as question-and-answer content. This is what takes your FAQ from “helpful for humans” to “instantly extractable by AI.”
Article, which helps AI tools understand that a blog post is editorial content, who wrote it, and when it was published.
If your eyes just glazed over, that’s fine. This is technical stuff, and it doesn’t need to be on your plate. Schema markup is something your web developer can add to your site, and the time investment is modest compared to the visibility it can provide. It’s one of those things where a small amount of your developer’s time can make the difference between AI tools understanding your business and skipping right past it.
4. Keep Your Business Information Where AI Can Actually Find It
When someone asks an AI tool to recommend a business, the AI often begins by running a search. It looks at the results, reads what it can, and builds a short list. But the process doesn’t always stop there. If someone wants to dig deeper, or if the AI needs more detail to give a confident answer, it may visit your website directly to learn more. Your site needs to work at both stages: showing up in search results to get on the short list, and having enough clear, detailed information to close the deal when AI comes looking for more.
That means two things matter a lot: where your information lives, and whether it’s consistent across every place AI might find it.
Your website is the foundation. It’s the one source you fully control that most AI tools can read directly and in full. Your business name, address, phone number, hours, service descriptions, and service area should all be clearly listed there, not buried in a PDF or hidden behind a contact form. (One caveat: some hosting providers block AI crawlers by default, which means your site might be invisible to ChatGPT and other tools even if it looks fine in Google. If you’re not sure, it’s worth asking your host or testing it yourself.)
After your website, think about everywhere else your business shows up online, and whether the information there is accurate. Here’s where it gets tricky: many AI tools can’t directly visit platforms like Instagram, Facebook, or Yelp. A lot of them also can’t directly access your Google Business Profile, except, of course, Google’s AI tools.
But AI tools are resourceful. They pick up fragments from those platforms through search result snippets. When a Yelp star rating or a BBB summary shows up in a search result, AI grabs that snippet even though it can’t visit the actual page. AI also carries older information in its training data, and it picks up details from blog posts, news articles, and directories that mention your business.
This is exactly why consistency matters so much. AI is assembling its understanding of your business from all of these scattered fragments. When they all tell the same story, the same name, address, phone number, and services, AI treats that as reliable. When the details conflict, maybe your website has your current address, but an old directory listing still shows a previous location, AI has to decide which one to trust. Sometimes it picks the wrong one. And sometimes, if AI can’t find enough information it trusts, it fills in the gaps on its own. AI hallucination is a real problem for small businesses. An AI tool might confidently tell a potential customer you offer a service you don’t provide, or give them an outdated phone number.
The fix is straightforward: start with your website and make sure it has your complete, accurate business details. Then audit your information everywhere else it appears, directory listings, review sites, social profiles, old articles, and correct anything that’s outdated or inconsistent. You can’t control every fragment AI finds, but you can make sure the ones you do control are telling the right story.
5. Build Your Reputation Where AI Can See It
When I asked both ChatGPT and Claude what matters most for getting a business recommended, they both put reviews near the top of the list. ChatGPT called reviews “probably the single biggest driver” of its recommendations.
Different AI tools may weight factors differently, and there’s no published formula for how any of them decide what to recommend. But it makes sense when you think about what AI tools are trying to do: figure out which businesses are trustworthy, well-regarded, and relevant to the question someone just asked. Reviews are one of the clearest signals they have. A business with a strong volume of recent, positive reviews across multiple platforms looks far more credible to an AI tool than one with a handful of old reviews or none at all.
What matters isn’t just your star rating. AI tools also pay attention to the volume of reviews (are people actually going there?), how recent they are (is this business still active and delivering?), and what people say in the review text itself. When a customer writes “best trauma-informed therapist I’ve found in Anne Arundel County” or “they fixed my brakes fast, and the price was fair,” those specific words become part of the information AI tools use to match your business to someone’s question. A review that says “great experience, highly recommend” is fine, but it gives the AI a lot less to work with.
If you’re already asking customers for Google reviews, you’re halfway there. But remember what we covered in the last section: AI tools can’t always see Google reviews directly. They pick up review information from search result snippets, from other review platforms, and from their training data. So it’s worth building your review presence in multiple places, not just Google. Yelp, industry-specific directories, and any platform where your customers naturally look for businesses like yours all contribute to the picture AI is building about your reputation.
A few practical things you can do:
Ask happy customers for reviews, and make it easy by sending them a direct link to the review page. Don’t just ask once and forget. Make it part of your regular process after a project wraps up or a service is delivered.
When you get reviews, respond to them. Activity on your review profiles signals to both search engines and AI tools that your business is engaged and current. A profile with dozens of reviews and zero responses from the business looks very different from one where the owner is actively thanking customers and addressing feedback.
Encourage specificity. When asking for a review, you might say something like “it would really help if you mentioned what service we provided and what your experience was like.” You’re not telling people what to write. You’re giving them a starting point that happens to produce the kind of detail AI tools find most useful.
Don’t ignore negative reviews, either. A thoughtful response to a complaint shows professionalism, and AI tools can pick up on that context. A business with all five-star reviews and no substance looks less credible than one with a 4.7 average and genuine, detailed feedback from real customers.
The bottom line: your online reputation has always mattered for attracting customers. What’s changed is that it now also matters for whether AI tools recommend you. The good news is that the work is the same. Deliver great service, ask for reviews, and make sure those reviews are visible in the places AI can find them.
This Builds on Your SEO Foundation
If you’ve been investing in SEO, take a breath. That work doesn’t just still count. It’s actually more important now than it was before.
Many AI tools use search as their primary source of real-time information. When someone asks ChatGPT for a business recommendation, the first thing it does is run a search. The pages that show up in those results are the ones the AI evaluates, reads, and potentially recommends. If your site isn’t ranking, AI tools won’t find it, no matter how good your content is.
That means everything that helps you rank, clear content, fast load times, quality backlinks, accurate business listings, a well-maintained Google Business Profile, is also what helps AI tools discover you. Your SEO work isn’t separate from your AI visibility. It’s the front door.
And it’s worth knowing that different AI tools use different search systems behind the scenes. ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google’s AI tools don’t all search the same way. There’s no single search engine you can optimize for and call it done. The businesses that consistently show up in AI tools are the ones with strong visibility across the board.
The tactics in this post will help your business get found in those searches, but they also add the next layer. Once AI tools find your business, these are the things that help them understand you, trust your information, and confidently recommend you. SEO gets you found. The tactics in this post help you get found and chosen.
The businesses that are winning in AI search right now are the ones doing solid, well-rounded digital marketing already, and then adding these AI-specific steps on top. It’s not a totally new game. It’s the same game with an extra layer.
Frequently Asked Questions
Your Customers Are Already Asking AI for Recommendations
The shift to AI search isn’t something coming next year. It’s happening now. My clients are already seeing new customers who found them this way, and businesses that take these steps now will have a head start over competitors who wait.
If you’re looking at this list and thinking, “I should do this, but I don’t know where to start,” that’s what we’re here for. We help small businesses build websites that are structured for both traditional search and AI search, and we offer SEO services that include the kind of optimization AI tools reward. Reach out, and we’ll take a look at where your business stands.