AI Search Optimisation: How to Get Your Business Cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews

Search behaviour has quietly changed. A growing share of queries never reach a traditional results page at all — they're answered directly inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews or Copilot. If your business isn't structured to be understood by these systems, you don't just rank lower — you're invisible to an entire, fast-growing channel.

Answer engines work differently from classic search crawlers. They favour content that is explicit, well-structured and easy to extract as a standalone fact — clear FAQs, defined services, structured data (JSON-LD), and pages that answer one question thoroughly rather than vaguely covering many.

The technical foundation matters just as much as the words on the page. Schema markup for Organization, LocalBusiness, Service and FAQPage gives crawlers machine-readable context about who you are, what you do and where you operate. Fast, semantic HTML — not JavaScript-only rendering that crawlers struggle to parse — remains essential.

There's also a newer convention worth adopting: an llms.txt file at your site root, summarising who you are, what you offer and your most important pages in plain language for AI crawlers. It's simple to add and increasingly recognised by AI systems as a trust signal.

Finally, location and service specificity matter more than ever. A generic 'we do web development' page competes with thousands of others. A page that clearly states 'web development services in Gujarat' or 'app development company in Andhra Pradesh', backed by real local detail, gives an answer engine a precise, confident fact to surface — which is exactly what we build into every Createlab client site from day one.