AI Overviews and ChatGPT: What They Mean for Your Business

Ask Google a question today and there’s a fair chance the answer appears at the top of the page, written by AI, before any website link. Ask ChatGPT or Perplexity who to buy from and you’ll get a shortlist of named businesses. For business owners this raises an uncomfortable question: if customers get answers without clicking, what happens to the website you’ve invested in — and how do you get named in those answers?

What’s actually changed

Google’s AI Overviews (and its fuller AI Mode) synthesise an answer from multiple sources and show it above the traditional results. Assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot go further, holding whole research conversations — “who’s a good ecommerce agency in the South West?” — and answering with names, comparisons and recommendations. A growing share of buying research now finishes inside these answers, particularly for informational questions.

Two consequences follow. Informational pages — the “what is / how to” content — tend to earn fewer clicks, because the answer gets given on the spot. And the businesses named inside AI answers gain an advantage that doesn’t show up in any rank tracker.

How AI assistants decide who to name

There’s no secret ranking to buy your way into. AI systems compose answers from sources they can find, read and trust, and the observable pattern is consistent: they favour content that answers questions directly and completely, sites that are technically easy to crawl, business details that are consistent across the web, and brands mentioned by credible third parties. Google has said plainly that no special optimisation exists for AI Overviews — the same fundamentals that earn rankings feed its AI results.

That’s genuinely good news for smaller businesses: the work is knowable. It’s the same discipline SEO has always rewarded, with the emphasis shifted towards being quotable, being specific and being talked about.

What a business should actually do

• Answer real questions properly. Pages that fully answer a buying question — with specifics, evidence and plain language — are what AI systems quote. Thin pages get skipped.
• Fix the technical foundations. If crawlers can’t reach or parse your content, you don’t exist to these systems. That includes deciding deliberately whether to allow AI crawlers like GPTBot rather than blocking them by accident.
• Use structured data. Schema markup for your services, locations, FAQs and reviews turns your pages from prose into facts machines can use confidently.
• Keep your details consistent. Your name, services and locations should read the same on your site, your Google Business Profile and the directories that matter in your industry.
• Earn mentions. Third-party citations — press, industry publications, credible directories — are among the strongest signals AI systems lean on when deciding who to recommend.

What to be sceptical of

The field is young, which means it’s noisy. Be wary of anyone guaranteeing placement in ChatGPT (answers vary by user, phrasing and day — nobody controls them), of “AI SEO” packages that are keyword stuffing with a new label, and of dashboards that report a tidy “AI rank” as if such a thing existed. What can honestly be measured: referral traffic from AI assistants, how assistants answer an agreed set of buying questions over time, and — most importantly — leads.

Where this fits alongside your SEO

None of this replaces search engine optimisation — it’s built on top of it. A site Google doesn’t trust won’t be quoted by an assistant either. The sensible approach is one strategy covering both: classic SEO for the rankings that still drive most traffic, plus deliberate work on quotability, structured data and citations for the AI layer. That combined work is exactly what our AI search optimisation service does, starting with an audit of how AI assistants describe your business and your competitors today. If you’d like to know what ChatGPT says when someone asks about your market — ask us for that audit. The answer is often motivating.