How do I get my business shown in AI search?

Why your own site is not enough

Every AI search system faces the same problem: it has to decide which businesses are worth putting in front of someone who asked a question, and it cannot visit your office or call your customers. So it does what a careful stranger does — it looks at what everyone else says about you.

That means a well-written website makes you eligible but does not make you chosen. A business with an excellent site and no third-party mentions is a business the model has thin evidence about, and thin evidence produces a hedge rather than a recommendation.

The three things that decide it

Corroboration: you are mentioned by name across independent sources the model already weights, in a pattern rather than once.

Consistency: the claims about you line up. Same services, same service area, same name, wherever you appear. Contradictory inputs make a business an unsafe answer, so models route around them.

Legibility: your own pages state plainly what you do, who for, and where, in prose a machine can lift. Numbers, prices, named methods and defined terms are quotable. Positioning copy is not.

What this shares with ordinary SEO

Most of it. AI systems do not have a separate internet — they read the same pages, follow the same links and lean on the same authority signals search engines have used for two decades. Editorial links built to rank on Google are doing double duty the day they go live.

The work that does not transfer is narrower than the industry implies: keyword density, exact-match phrasing and meta description tactics do nothing here, and ranking first does not guarantee a citation.