AI search
AI search is when someone gets their answer from a chatbot or AI overview instead of a list of blue links, which changes who gets found and how.
AI search is the growing habit of asking a question to ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Mode and getting a written answer back, instead of a page of ranked links to click through yourself. The person still has a question. They just no longer expect to do the reading.
This matters because the old rules of showing up don’t fully transfer. A page that earns a strong organic result on classic Google can still be invisible to AI search if it never states its facts plainly, or if the AI tool finds a more direct answer somewhere else entirely, sometimes a page that ranks nowhere near the top ten on a traditional search. I have audited sites that had never once appeared in an AI-generated answer to a question they were the obvious answer to.
The four tools named above are not interchangeable either. Each pulls from a different mix of sources and behaves a little differently, which is why I test all four rather than assuming a fix for one carries over.
Why it matters to you
If a buyer asks “who does resilience keynotes in Canada” or “how much does counselling cost in Langley” into an AI tool instead of Google, the businesses that get named are the ones whose facts were clear and easy to lift. The businesses that get skipped, or worse, described inaccurately, simply do not exist in that buyer’s mind. There is no second page of results to fall back to. The conversation is already over.
I have watched this go wrong in real ways: a speaking fee invented out of thin air, testimonials fabricated and attributed to the wrong bureau, a representative named who no longer represents the person at all. None of that is theoretical. It is what happens by default when a business has not done the AEO and GEO work to make the true answer easy to find.
How I use it
Testing is the first move, not the last. I run the real questions a buyer would ask through all four tools and read exactly what they say back, including which page they cite. That tells me where I am invisible, where I am wrong, and where I am actually doing fine. Only then do I build or fix pages, because guessing at the problem wastes the client’s time.
I also check agentic browsing, whether an AI assistant can actually load and use the site on someone’s behalf, since that is a related but separate failure mode from being described accurately.
What it looks like in practice
The clearest before-and-after is a screen recording: the same question, asked before and after the work, with the answer changing from wrong or absent to correct and sourced from the client’s own site. That is the whole deliverable. Nobody signs up for AI search directly. They sign up for the answer being right when it matters.
Questions I get about this
- Do people actually use ChatGPT instead of Google to search?
- More every year, and for a specific kind of question, who does this, what does it cost, is this person legitimate, they often go straight to an AI tool because it saves them reading five pages themselves. Those are exactly the questions that decide whether someone books you.
- If I rank well on Google, am I automatically fine on AI search?
- Not automatically. AI tools pull from a different mix of signals and often favour a page that states a fact plainly over a page that ranks well but buries the answer in marketing language. I have seen sites that rank fine on Google get skipped entirely, or misquoted, by AI search.
- Can I stop AI tools from using my site's content?
- You can block their crawlers, but I generally advise against it for a business that wants to be found. Blocking them does not stop them answering questions about you, it just means they answer without your own words in front of them, which tends to make the answer worse, not absent.
Where this fits in our work
Want this set up properly for your business?
This is the kind of thing I build every week. Grab a time and we will talk through what fits.