A growing number of buying decisions now start with a question typed into ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google’s AI Overviews. The answer names two or three businesses. There is no page two, and there is nothing to scroll past.
Why this is not just SEO with a new name
Classic SEO earns a clickable position in a list. AI optimisation earns a mention inside a generated answer. The systems drawing those answers care much more about clear facts, structured data and whether other credible sources say the same thing about you.
Four things that make a business easier to recommend
- Answer questions directly. A page that states the price range, the timeline and the process in plain sentences is quotable. A page of adjectives is not.
- Add structured data. Organisation, service, FAQ and review markup remove the guesswork about what you do and where.
- Be consistent everywhere. If your services and address differ across five profiles, no system can state anything about you with confidence.
- Earn third-party mentions. Being described accurately on sites the model already trusts matters more than anything you write about yourself.
How to measure it
Write down the ten questions a customer would realistically ask an assistant before choosing a business like yours. Run them once a month across the major assistants and record whether you are named, how you are described and who appears alongside you. That list is your ranking report for AI search.
None of this replaces SEO. Your website still has to exist, load fast and say something specific. AI optimisation is the layer on top that decides whether a machine is willing to put your name in a sentence.
