How to Get Your Business to Show Up in AI Search

Somebody looking for a supplier used to open Google and work down a page of blue links. A growing number now open ChatGPT instead, ask a question in ordinary words, and get back two or three names with a short reason attached to each. There is no page two. If your business is not in that answer, you were not in the running, and nothing about it tells you that you were passed over.

This guide covers what AI search actually is, what the term generative engine optimisation means and where it is overused, why an assistant names one business rather than another, and the work that genuinely moves it. Nothing here needs a technical background.

What "AI search" actually means

It covers two different things that get bundled together, and they behave differently.

The first is asking an assistant like ChatGPT a question directly. It answers from what it has read and remembered, sometimes checking the live web and sometimes not. The second is the AI answer Google now writes at the top of its own results page, above the ordinary links, summarising several sources and citing a handful of them by name.

The important thing both have in common is that they return an answer rather than a list. A list has room for ten results and rewards being roughly relevant. An answer has room for about three and rewards being the clearest thing on the subject. That single difference explains most of what follows.

What is generative engine optimisation?

Generative engine optimisation, usually shortened to GEO, is the practice of making a business more likely to be named in those generated answers. The name is newer than the work.

It is worth being blunt about how much of it is genuinely new, because the term is already being sold as though it were a separate discipline with its own secrets. It is not. Perhaps eight parts in ten is ordinary good practice that has mattered for a decade: pages that say something definite, plain text rather than pictures of text, fast loading, and honest answers to questions people actually ask.

The remaining part is a real shift, and it is this. Ranking was about one page earning a position for one phrase. Being named in an answer is about how your business is described everywhere an assistant has read about it, including places you do not control. The unit of optimisation moved from the page to the description.

Why an assistant names one business and not another

Most of the time an assistant is not searching the web at the moment you ask. It is recalling. It answers from a picture of the world built out of everything it has read, and that picture contains businesses that were described clearly somewhere and does not contain businesses that were not.

This has a consequence people find uncomfortable when they first hear it. The assistant can only give back a description that already exists in words somewhere. It cannot infer that you are good at your job from the fact that you are. A business described in the same stock language as every competitor has handed it nothing to recall, and being genuinely excellent does not compensate, because excellence that was never written down is invisible to something that only reads.

It also compounds. Assistants tend to return the same names repeatedly, so a business that is already describable keeps getting named while one that is not stays absent, and the gap widens on its own.

The work that actually moves it

Say what you do in words, not pictures

Text baked into an image is invisible to everything that reads your site. So is text hidden behind a slider, a video, or an animation that only reveals it after an interaction. Plenty of otherwise smart sites keep their single clearest sentence inside a graphic in the hero, which is the one place it does the least good.

The same goes for software and tooling. If you work with Xero, QuickBooks or Dext, write the names in text on the page. A row of logos says nothing to a machine.

Be specific about who you serve, and where

"We work with sole traders and small limited companies across Greater Manchester" is a sentence an assistant can lift and use. "We serve businesses of all sizes nationwide" is not, because it describes no one in particular and every competitor could have written it.

Naming the customer you actually want is the highest-value change on most websites, and it is the one people resist hardest, because it reads like turning work away. It is the opposite. Specific is the only thing that is memorable, and being memorable is the entire game here.

Answer real questions in writing

Every business gets asked the same handful of things before anyone commits. How quickly do you reply. What happens in the first month. Who will I actually be dealing with. What does this cost, and how is it decided.

Answering those on the page does two jobs at once. It stops the same questions arriving by email, and it gives an assistant exactly the kind of specific, quotable material it draws on. A question answered in plain language is far more useful here than another paragraph of description.

Get described somewhere other than your own site

This is the part that is genuinely different from old-fashioned SEO, and the part most people skip. An assistant weighs a description more heavily when it appears in more than one place, written by more than one party. A consistent description across your own site, your Google Business Profile, any trade directory you belong to and any coverage you have had is worth considerably more than the same words repeated three times on your own pages.

Consistency matters more than volume. Three places that describe your business the same way beat ten that each describe it slightly differently, because the differences give an assistant nothing firm to settle on.

Make the page readable at all

A slow page, a wall of scripts, or a layout that hides most of the text until something loads all reduce what a machine can take from the page. This overlaps almost entirely with what makes a site pleasant for people, which is the reassuring part. There is no version of this work that improves your standing with assistants and makes the site worse for visitors.

What does not work

Two things are worth naming, because both are already being sold.

The first is stuffing pages with phrases like "best in Manchester" in the hope an assistant repeats them. It reads as marketing copy, which is the category of text these systems are least inclined to trust, and it makes the page worse for the humans who reach it.

The second is any offer of paid placement inside an AI answer. There is no such product. Nobody can buy a slot in a generated recommendation, and an agency implying otherwise is either confused or hoping you are.

Does this replace SEO?

No, and treating the two as separate budgets is a mistake that costs money twice. The overlap is most of the work. Clear specific pages, fast loading, plain text, real answers and a consistent description across the web serve both, and always did.

What changed is the cost of skipping it. A vague website used to underperform quietly, and you could tell yourself it was fine. Now there is a way to ask a direct question and get a straight yes or no back, which is much harder to explain away than a ranking that moved.

So the honest framing is that this is a website development problem and an SEO problem wearing a new name. The fix is not a trick. It is writing pages that say something definite and building them so a machine can read them.

How to see where you stand

Start by reading your own homepage as a stranger would, ignoring everything you already know about the business. Ask whether the words alone tell you what this company does, who it is for, and where it is. Most people find at least one of those three is missing from the page entirely.

Then ask an assistant directly. Phrase it the way a stranger would, naming what you do and the town you are in rather than naming your company, because asking about yourself by name proves nothing. If you would rather have it run for you, our AI visibility checker asks the question and reports whether you appear, in about a minute.

Whatever comes back, it is information you did not have. The most common result by a distance is no mention at all, which is worth knowing precisely because nothing else will ever tell you.

Why choose Dawn Studio

We hand-build websites in modern code, with no WordPress and no page builders, which is why they load quickly and stay readable to people and machines alike. Most of our work is with UK accountancy practices, and the advice above came out of asking these questions about our own site before we asked anyone else to.

We do not sell AI visibility as a separate product, because it is not one. It is what you get from a clear, fast, plainly written website, which is the thing we actually build.