Getting Found By AI

Ten chapters on the move from Google to AI answers, and how a local business gets named by them. Each chapter has videos to watch, articles to read, the notes, flashcards and a quiz.

CHAPTER 1

From Ten Blue Links To One Answer

For twenty years a search meant a list of websites and you did the clicking. Now Google, ChatGPT and the rest read the websites for you and hand back one answer. This chapter is the big picture: what changed, how fast, and why the click is the thing that died, not Google.

Watch

Neil Patel, AI-SEO Is Changing Everything in 2026about 12 minutes

Listen for: AI sends almost no visitors but drives real sales; the five habits he says to adopt.

Blaze Byte Media, Zero-Click Search Explainedabout 9 minutes

Listen for: the difference between a search engine quoting you and rewriting you; sorting your pages by the job each one does.

Read

What To Know

  • Google is not shrinking. Google reported its fastest search growth in 5 years in October 2026, and searches went up 21.6% in 2024 alone.
  • What shrank is the click. 68% of US Google searches now end without anyone clicking a website, up from 60% in 2024 (SparkToro).
  • Google's AI answer box, called AI Overviews, is seen by 2.5 billion people a month. Google's chat tab, called AI Mode, passed 1 billion monthly users (Google, May 2026).
  • When the AI box shows, only 8% of people click any result, against 15% when it does not. Only 1% click a link inside the box itself (Pew).
  • The number one ranking website loses about 58% of the clicks it used to get when an AI answer appears above it. Even position ten loses 19% (Ahrefs, 300,000 searches).
  • ChatGPT has about 900 million weekly users (February 2026), but AI chat still sends only about a fifth as many people to websites as search does.
  • The AI engines send few visitors but good ones. Semrush measured visitors from AI converting 4.4x better than visitors from Google. Neil Patel's own clients saw AI drive under 1% of visits but about 10% of sales.
  • Gartner predicted in 2024 that search volume would fall 25% by 2026. It did not happen. Searches rose; clicks fell.
  • The engine quotes you two ways. Extraction is lifting your exact words with a clear link, like Google's old featured snippet. Synthesis is reading you and five rivals and writing a new paragraph, which is what the AI box does. Synthesis gives far fewer clicks.
  • Not every search had the same job. A "how much does X cost" page was never going to sell anything on its own, so losing that click costs little. A "Medicare agent in Tampa" search is a phone call, and that one still matters.

Words To Know

AI Overviews
Google's AI answer box that sits above the normal results.
AI Mode
Google's separate chat-style search tab, powered by Gemini.
Zero-click search
a search where the person gets what they need without opening any website.
Answer engine
any tool that hands back an answer instead of a list: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google's AI box.
Click-through rate
out of every 100 people who see your listing, how many click it.
Extraction
the engine quotes your exact words and links you.
Synthesis
the engine blends several sites into a new paragraph, with weak credit to each.

Don't Mix These Up

  • Searches are up, clicks are down. The people did not leave Google. They stopped clicking through.
  • Traffic is not revenue. AI sends a trickle of visitors who convert several times better. Judge it by leads and sales, not visits.
  • AI Overviews vs AI Mode — both are Google, but they pull from different sources and only overlap about 14% of the time (Ahrefs).
CHAPTER 2

Who Loses And Who Wins

The same change that is wrecking news sites and coupon blogs is close to harmless for a business that sells its own service. This chapter sorts the losers from the winners, and shows where a Medicare agency and a local service business sit.

Watch

Edward Sturm, The Era of 10 Blue Links Is Overabout 11 minutes

Listen for: who bleeds (publishers and affiliates) and who is fine (businesses selling their own services), and why the old bottom-of-funnel pages still work.

Read

What To Know

  • The losers are sites that live on clicks: news publishers, recipe and review blogs, affiliate sites that earn a commission when you click their link. AI reads them and recommends the product without the link.
  • Businesses that sell their own product or service lose far less. The AI still has to name someone, and the phone call or the sign-up happens with you, not with Google.
  • Fewer people will try the old search tricks now, which can mean less competition for the ones who keep going.
  • Health is the most affected field of all. Google's AI box shows on 88% of healthcare searches, up from 72% in May 2024 (BrightEdge).
  • Insurance is catching up. The AI box shows on 41% of US insurance searches. Carriers get named more than brokers: Progressive, Allstate and UnitedHealthcare lead the carriers, Policygenius and SelectQuote lead the middlemen (Conductor).
  • In insurance, 53% of the pages the AI box cited were not in Google's top ten. Ranking and being cited are different games.
  • Local searches split in two. Questions like "how much does a Medicare plan cost" get an AI answer 58% of the time. Buying searches like "Medicare agent near me" get one about 17% of the time (Local Falcon, 60,000 searches).
  • "Near me" searches still show Google's map box every single time and the AI box almost never (DAC, 700 searches in insurance and home services).
  • So the AI takes the question stage above you, and the map box still owns the "who do I call" stage. Both have to be won.
  • The old playbook still works for the buying stage: a page for each service, each city, each "X vs Y" comparison and each "alternatives to X" question.
  • Google says it is not making AI Mode the default search. A Chrome test that did so in June 2026 was called an error by Google's search lead.

Words To Know

Publisher
a site that earns from ads on pages people read: news, magazines, big blogs.
Affiliate
a site that earns a commission when a reader clicks its link and buys.
Map box
the three-business map Google shows for local searches, fed by Google Business Profile.
Bottom of funnel
the searches people make when they already know what they want and are picking who to buy from.
Informational search
a question search: how much, what is, is it worth it.
Commercial search
a buying search: best, near me, agent in, book, quote.

Don't Mix These Up

  • Question searches vs buying searches. AI takes the questions. The map box keeps the buying searches. Different fixes for each.
  • Carriers vs agents. When AI names an insurance company it is mostly naming the carrier, not an agency. An agency has to earn its place through local signals, covered in chapters 7 to 9.
  • A publisher's panic is not yours. Their business is the click. Yours is the call.
CHAPTER 3

The Five Answer Engines And How Each Picks

There is no single "AI search". Google's AI box, Google's AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini each have their own reading list and their own favourites. A business that shows up in one is often invisible in the others.

Watch

Ahrefs, How Ranking in Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity Are Differentabout 6 minutes

Listen for: only 7 of the top 50 sources are shared by all three engines; what each one prefers.

Read

What To Know

  • Ahrefs compared the 50 most-cited sites on each engine. Only 7 of the 50 appeared on all three. That is a 14% overlap.
  • A wider count found 91% of 3.7 million citations appeared on only one engine (Growth Memo, 2026).
  • Google's AI box likes established, trusted sites: health, finance, reference pages, and YouTube, which Google owns. YouTube is about 5.6% of all its citations and climbing.
  • Google's AI Mode cites YouTube by a wide margin, then Google's own pages and Wikipedia, and it uses Quora 3.5x more than the AI box. It also leans on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.
  • ChatGPT leans toward big publishers and media: Reddit, Wikipedia, Forbes, Business Insider. The typical site it cites has a trust score of 90 out of 100. Part of that is licensing deals OpenAI signed with publishers.
  • ChatGPT's reading list changes fast. Reddit was in about 60% of its answers in August 2025 and about 10% by mid-September (Semrush).
  • Perplexity is the closest to plain Google. About 29% of its citations come from Google's top 10, against only 8 to 10% for ChatGPT. If you rank well on Google, Perplexity shows it first.
  • When ChatGPT cites a page, that page sits at position 21 or worse on Google about 90% of the time (Semrush). Page one of Google is not what gets you into ChatGPT.
  • Engines differ in whether they say your name. Gemini names the brand behind a source 84% of the time, ChatGPT only 21% (Semrush ghost citations).
  • Gemini, for local service questions, cites the business's own website about 60% of the time, then Reddit (MarTech, 14,000 citations).
  • The link between a Google ranking and an AI citation is weakening. In July 2025, 76% of AI box sources came from Google's top 10. By March 2026 it was 38% (Ahrefs).
  • Where the eyeballs are: Google's AI features and ChatGPT carry most AI search traffic. Perplexity is growing but small. Gemini's share of AI chat rose from a sliver to about 27% in a year, while ChatGPT fell from 76% to 53% (Similarweb).

Words To Know

Citation
the engine naming a web page as a source for its answer.
Mention
your business name appearing in the answer text. You can be cited without being mentioned, and the other way around.
Perplexity
an answer engine that always shows its sources, used mostly by researchers and tech people.
Gemini
Google's chat assistant, separate from Google search, that also answers questions and names businesses.
Retrieval
the step where the engine goes and reads live web pages before answering, instead of relying on what it memorised.

Don't Mix These Up

  • Google's AI box vs Google's AI Mode. Same company, different sources. Their answers are 86% alike but they only share 13.7% of their citations.
  • ChatGPT vs Perplexity. ChatGPT wants big-name publishers. Perplexity wants Google's top results. Ranking well on Google helps Perplexity far more than ChatGPT.
  • Cited vs mentioned. Semrush found 62% of citations never produced a brand mention in the answer. The mention is what the customer reads.
CHAPTER 4

How AI Decides Which Business To Name

An answer engine does not pick the best website. It breaks the question into smaller questions, reads what the whole web says about you, and weighs how often, how recently and how trusted. This chapter is the mechanism, and the five things that measurably move it.

Watch

Ahrefs, The New SEO Playbook for AI Searchabout 9 minutes

Listen for: brand mentions beat links; the engine splits your question into many small ones; fresh content wins; check you are not blocking the robots.

Read

What To Know

  • The engine fans out. Ask "best Medicare agent in Orlando" and it quietly runs 10 or more smaller searches: who is licensed there, what do reviews say, what do they cost, which carriers, who is open. Then it blends what it found.
  • Being mentioned on other websites predicts AI visibility far better than links do. Across 75,000 brands, web mentions scored 0.66 on a 0-to-1 scale and backlinks scored 0.22 (Ahrefs).
  • Brands in the top quarter for mentions averaged 169 AI box appearances. The next quarter averaged 14. One in four brands had none.
  • For ChatGPT, the single strongest predictor of being named is ranking on Google's first page, at about 0.65. Bing ranking is close behind. Links had little or no effect (Seer Interactive, 10,000 answers).
  • Content changes that raised visibility in the only controlled study: quotes from named people +41%, statistics +33%, citing sources +28%. Stuffing keywords made it 9% worse, the only tactic that went below the starting point (GEO study, 10,000 questions).
  • The gains were biggest for pages ranked lower down. A page in fifth place gained over 100% from citing sources. The page already in first place gained nothing.
  • AI prefers fresh pages. Cited pages were on average 25.7% newer than pages in normal Google results. ChatGPT and Perplexity list sources newest first (Ahrefs, 17 million citations). Google's AI box cares the least about age.
  • Updating a page works. When HubSpot refreshed one article, AI mentions of it spiked alongside the traffic.
  • Where to get mentioned differs by engine. Pages with many links pointing at them help with Google's AI box. Pages with lots of traffic help with ChatGPT and Perplexity.
  • The honest line from Ahrefs: nobody has a proven formula yet. What exists is data on what lines up with visibility, not proof of what causes it.

How an engine builds a local answer

  1. It reads the question and decides what kind of answer is wanted: a list of businesses, a price, a yes or no.
  2. It splits the question into smaller ones about cost, licensing, area, reviews, availability.
  3. It fetches pages for each: your site, Google Business Profile, Yelp, Reddit, YouTube, news, directories.
  4. It compares what each source says, weighing recency, consistency and trust.
  5. It writes one answer and names the businesses that showed up most consistently across those sources.

Words To Know

Query fan-out
one question split into many smaller searches run at once.
Brand mention
your business name on a page you do not own, linked or not.
Backlink
another site linking to yours. The old currency of search. Worth much less to AI.
Correlation
two things rising together. Not proof that one causes the other.
Freshness
how recently a page was published or meaningfully updated.
GEO
generative engine optimization. The new name for getting named by AI. Also called AEO, answer engine optimization.

Don't Mix These Up

  • Mentions vs links. A news article that names you with no link now counts for more than a link from a nobody.
  • New vs re-dated. Changing the date without changing the page does nothing. Add a new number, a new quote, remove what is stale, then re-date.
  • Rank one vs rank five. The tactics in this chapter lift the pages that are close, not the ones already on top. Use them on your second-tier pages.
CHAPTER 5

Can AI Even Read Your Website

Before any clever content, three plumbing checks decide whether an engine can see your site at all. Most sites fail at least one without knowing. Two popular "AI fixes" are also sold that do nothing, and this chapter names them so no money is wasted.

Watch

Nathan Gotch, How to Show Up in ChatGPT in 2026, first 2 minutes

Listen for: the one-line robots fix; HTML not JavaScript; 2.5 second load time.

Surfer Academy, How to Dominate AI Search Results in 2026, from 8:30 to 10:30

Listen for: the robots check, Bing, text that is really on the page.

Read

What To Know

  • Every website has a small permissions file at its address followed by /robots.txt. It tells robots who may read the site. About 5.9% of 140 million sites block OpenAI's robot by accident (Ahrefs).
  • Each engine has a search robot that must be allowed: OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT, PerplexityBot for Perplexity, Claude-SearchBot for Claude, and Google's and Bing's normal robots. OpenAI says plainly that a site blocking OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT answers.
  • Two different OpenAI robots exist. GPTBot only collects training material and blocking it costs no visibility. OAI-SearchBot is the one that matters.
  • Google-Extended only controls Gemini's training. It does not affect the AI box or AI Mode. The only way out of those is a switch in Google's own Search Console.
  • Website shields like Cloudflare often block AI robots by default. Check the firewall rules, not just the permissions file.
  • The words must be real text on the page. Sites built by some no-code and AI builders paint the page with JavaScript after loading, and AI robots read the page before that happens, so they see nothing. Test the page with JavaScript switched off.
  • Speed matters. Aim for the page to load in 2.5 seconds or less. A one-second delay costs about 7% of conversions.
  • ChatGPT leans on outside search engines to look things up, and tests have matched its results to Bing. Being listed in Bing Webmaster Tools is cheap insurance.
  • Google's rule for its AI box and AI Mode is one line: the page must be indexed and allowed to show a snippet. Nothing else.
  • Two things sold as AI fixes do nothing. The llms.txt file: only 10% of 300,000 sites have one, no link to citations, and 97% of sites that have it never get a single request for it. Google's own engineers said no AI system uses it.
  • Hidden page code tags, called schema, were tested on 1,885 pages against 4,000 matched controls. No gain on ChatGPT or AI Mode, and a 4.6% drop in the AI box. Keep them for ordinary Google rich results, not for AI.

The plumbing check, in order

  1. Open yoursite.com/robots.txt. Make sure no line says Disallow for OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot, Googlebot or Bingbot.
  2. If the site sits behind Cloudflare or a firewall, check its bot rules allow the same robots.
  3. Open a service page with JavaScript off. If the services, prices, hours and address vanish, the page needs rebuilding as plain text.
  4. Run the page through a speed test. Fix anything over 2.5 seconds.
  5. Register the site with Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Search Console.
  6. Switch on Search Console's Generative AI report so you can see AI box and AI Mode impressions.

Words To Know

robots.txt
the permissions file that tells search robots what they may read.
Crawl
a robot reading your pages.
Index
the engine's stored copy of your pages, which it answers from.
JavaScript rendering
a page that fills in its content after loading, which AI robots often miss.
llms.txt
a proposed file for AI readers that no engine uses.
Schema
hidden tags describing a page to machines. Useful for Google's star ratings and event listings, not for AI citations.
Bing Webmaster Tools
Microsoft's free sign-up to get your site into Bing.

Don't Mix These Up

  • GPTBot vs OAI-SearchBot. The first is training, the second is search. Block the first if you like, never the second.
  • Google-Extended vs the AI box. Blocking Google-Extended changes nothing about whether you appear in Google's AI answers.
  • Indexed vs allowed. A page can be in Google and still hidden from ChatGPT by one line in the permissions file.
CHAPTER 6

Pages AI Will Quote

An engine reads a page the way a tired reader does: it chunks it into pieces, keeps the ones that answer the question in plain words with a number attached, and throws the rest away. This chapter is how to write the pages, which pages to write, and how many.

Watch

Surfer Academy, How to Dominate AI Search Results in 2026about 18 minutes

Listen for: question headings answered directly, lists and tables, directories to be listed in, the "best of" roundups.

Vasco's SEO Tips, How to do GEO, first 13 minutes

Listen for: the engines only repeat what you have put out there; the conversation is a funnel of follow-up questions; the "you vs them" comparison pages.

Nathan Gotch, pillar two, from 2:04 to 5:07

Listen for: one service page per service per city; the plumber with 500 pages; competitor seeding.

Neil Patel, strategies three and four, from 4:04 to 9:12

Listen for: write like you are answering a question; facts and comparisons get cited most.

Read

  • The GEO study results: numbers, quotes and sources each lift visibility 25 to 40%.
  • Bright Data, 2026 (secondary report): 44% of ChatGPT citations come from the first 30% of a page.

What To Know

  • Lead with the answer. The first 40 to 60 words under each heading should answer the heading's question on its own. Engines take 44% of ChatGPT citations from the top third of a page (Bright Data).
  • Write headings as the question a person would ask: "How much does a Medicare Advantage plan cost in Florida?" Then answer it directly underneath.
  • Give every answer something concrete: a number, a date, a named source, a quote from a real person. Vague claims get skipped. Fabricated ones get caught.
  • Short paragraphs, bullet lists for steps, a table for anything that compares. Engines can quote a single table cell.
  • Each section should make sense if it is cut out and read alone, because that is exactly what the engine does.
  • Build depth, not keyword repeats. Pages that rank higher actually use the keyword less. What counts is covering the whole subject: one main page and a cluster of specific pages under it.
  • One page per service, per city. A plumber with 7 pages got no visitors. One with 500 got 23,000 a month. A Medicare agency can easily have 25 to 50 real pages: each plan type, each county served, each carrier, each enrollment window.
  • Write the pages people type into ChatGPT, not just into Google: "how much", "is it worth it", "what is the difference", "what do I need", "what happens if I miss the deadline".
  • Write the comparison pages nobody likes writing: "Agency A vs Agency B in Tampa", "alternatives to Carrier X", "top 10 Medicare agents in Orlando". These are low-competition and exactly what an engine retrieves when it is unsure.
  • Have a thorough FAQ. Short question, short direct answer, no fluff. Engines lift these whole.
  • Long pages do get cited. ChatGPT likes 3,000 to 5,000 words when the page is a real guide. But thin copy-paste city pages are treated as spam and rarely cited.
  • Blog regularly. Companies that kept blogging lost some Google traffic but gained AI traffic and total sales. The engines cite blogs, news and LinkedIn articles most.
  • Add pictures, a chart or an embedded video. Pages with mixed media get cited more.
  • Put the video's transcript on the page under the video. The engine reads words, not pictures.
  • Test it. Paste a page into ChatGPT and ask it to summarise. If it misses the point, rewrite.

Writing one service page

  1. Pick one service and one place: "Medicare Supplement plans in Hillsborough County".
  2. Write the question as the heading and answer it in the first 50 words.
  3. Add the proof: a cost range, a date, a carrier name, a licence number, a quote from the agent.
  4. Add a short table if anything compares: plan types, prices, deadlines.
  5. Add five to eight real questions clients ask, each with a two-sentence answer.
  6. Add one photo of the office or team and one short video with its transcript.
  7. Put the date on it. Refresh the facts every few months and re-date when something real changed.

Words To Know

Answer-first
the direct answer comes before the explanation.
Topic cluster
one main page on a subject linked to many specific pages beneath it.
Service page
a page for one service in one place.
Comparison page
"X vs Y" written by you so the engine has your version.
Competitor seeding
writing the "best of" and "alternatives to" pages for your own area yourself.
FAQ
a list of real questions with short direct answers.
Transcript
the written words of a video, placed on the page under it.

Don't Mix These Up

  • Depth vs stuffing. Say more about the subject. Do not say the same phrase more times.
  • Long vs thin. A 4,000-word real guide gets cited. Fifty copy-paste city pages get ignored.
  • Website for people vs pages for AI. Both live on the same site. Keep the menu short for people, and let the deep question pages sit off the menu but linked.
CHAPTER 7

Your Google Business Profile Is Your AI Homepage

For a local business the single most-read page is not the website. It is the Google Business Profile, the listing that feeds the map box, Google's AI box, AI Mode and Gemini. One wrong hour or category on it, and one in three AI answers about you will be wrong.

Watch

Momentum 360, How to Get Your Google Business Profile Found by AI Search in 2026about 4 minutes

Listen for: the same story everywhere; primary category and secondary services; reviews that name the service and the area; posts.

Marketing 360, Local SEO in 2026: AI Changed Everything, from the start to 6:24

Listen for: the name, address and phone rule across 50 directories; Google's AI review summary that you do not control.

Read

  • BrightLocal, August 2026: Google Business Profile is 28.6% of all local AI citations and cited for 94% of businesses.
  • MarTech, August 2026: Gemini cites the business website 60% of the time for local service questions.

What To Know

  • Google Business Profile is the biggest single source of local AI answers: 28.6% of all local citations, and cited for 94% of businesses studied (BrightLocal, 1,355 locations).
  • By engine: Google's AI box takes about 67% of its local sources from Google Business Profile, AI Mode about 53%. ChatGPT barely uses it and takes about 61% of its local sources from Yelp instead.
  • Facebook pages were used as a source for 93% of the businesses studied, so the Facebook page counts as a listing too (BrightLocal).
  • Gemini is the least consistent engine. Ask it the same local question twice and only about 40% of its sources repeat. The same top business came back only 7% of the time, against about 90% for Google's map box (MarTech).
  • Google's own guidance is to keep the profile complete and current for its AI features. It is the foundation of Gemini and AI Mode's local answers.
  • Fill every field: primary category, secondary categories, every service, every service area, hours, holiday hours, photos, the website, the phone. Nothing left blank.
  • The primary category is centre stage. It is what the business fundamentally is. Secondary services spell out the rest: not "insurance" but "Medicare Advantage plans", "Medicare Supplement plans", "Part D drug plans", "annual enrollment help".
  • The name, address and phone must be identical everywhere: profile, website, Facebook, Yelp, Bing, Apple, every directory. If they conflict, the engine trusts none of them and names someone else.
  • One in three AI answers get a fact wrong when the profile has wrong information. Wrong hours or a stale number means the engine tells a client you are closed.
  • Google now writes an AI summary of your reviews on the profile and you cannot edit it. It is built from the words clients use, so the words they use become your pitch.
  • Post on the profile regularly: answered questions, photos of real work, one update a week. An idle profile looks like a closed business.
  • Mark the location on posts and photos. The engine reads place signals.

Profile check, in order

  1. Confirm the business name on the profile matches the sign on the door, with no extra keywords added.
  2. Set the primary category to the one true thing the business is.
  3. List every service as a separate line, in the words a client would use.
  4. List every county or city served.
  5. Fill hours, holiday hours and the emergency or after-hours number if there is one.
  6. Add 10 or more real photos: office, team, the sign, a client meeting with permission.
  7. Read the AI review summary on the profile and note which words it picked up.
  8. Schedule one post a week.

Words To Know

Google Business Profile
the free Google listing that powers the map box and feeds the AI answers.
Primary category
the one label that says what kind of business this is.
Service area
the towns and counties the business serves, listed on the profile.
NAP
name, address, phone. The three facts that must match everywhere.
Review summary
the AI-written paragraph Google places on a profile, built from the reviews.
Profile post
a short update, photo or answered question published on the profile.

Don't Mix These Up

  • Google's engines vs ChatGPT. Google's AI reads the profile. ChatGPT reads Yelp. Both need feeding.
  • Primary category vs services. One category, many services. Stuffing the category with keywords gets the profile flagged.
  • Complete vs active. A profile can be fully filled in and still look dead. Posts and fresh reviews are the pulse.
CHAPTER 8

Reviews, Listings And Yelp

Reviews are no longer stars on a page. They are the raw material every engine reads to decide what you are good at, and recent ones count most. The listings on the other directories are the second half: they are the places ChatGPT actually reads for local answers.

Watch

PushLeads, How to Get Your Local Business Recommended by ChatGPT and Google AI, from 4:35 to 7:15

Listen for: Yelp in 80% of ChatGPT's local answers; which directories AI reads; ask reviewers to name the service and the town.

Marketing 360, from 3:12 to 6:24

Listen for: the engine reads every word of a review, not the star count; respond to every review; recent reviews weigh more.

Read

What To Know

  • Where local AI answers come from: about 44% from the business's own website, 42% from business listings, 28% from Google Business Profile, and only 2% from forums like Reddit. These overlap, so they add up past 100 (PushLeads, citing industry data).
  • Yelp appears in about 80% of ChatGPT's local answers. ChatGPT takes 61% of its local sources from Yelp and almost none from Google (BrightLocal).
  • After Google and Yelp, the directories engines cite: Facebook, the Better Business Bureau, Tripadvisor, MapQuest, Angi, and trade-specific directories. Instagram and Reddit are each under 2% for local answers.
  • Bing Places feeds Copilot and ChatGPT's lookups. Apple Business Connect feeds Siri. Both are free listings.
  • Reviews are a gate. The engine looks for the words a question needs. "Best emergency plumber in Austin" means it scans reviews for "emergency", "same day", "fast". Five stars with no words helps less than four stars that say what happened.
  • Recent reviews outweigh old ones. Reviews from five years ago barely register. A steady stream of new ones is the signal.
  • Ask every client for a review, and ask them to name the service and the town: "helped me pick a Medicare Advantage plan in Lakeland". Give them the two things to mention.
  • Get reviews in more than one place: Google first, then Yelp, Facebook and the Better Business Bureau.
  • Reply to every review. Businesses that do not reply are 30% more likely to drop in local rankings. One unanswered angry review costs future clients.
  • Automate the ask: a message after the sale, a reminder a few days later if no review came.
  • Never buy reviews or write fake ones. Engines and Google detect it, and it poisons the AI's view of you.
  • Claim every directory listing with the identical name, address and phone. Businesses should be on 50 or more directories, including old ones like Yellow Pages and MapQuest.

Setting up the review engine

  1. Choose the two sentences you want clients to say: the service, the town.
  2. Send the review link the day the sale closes, by text, with those two prompts.
  3. Send one reminder five days later if nothing came.
  4. Reply to every review within a day, thanking by name and repeating the service.
  5. Handle a bad review in public, calmly, with a fix, then ask the client to update it.
  6. Once a month, copy the newest three Google reviews into Yelp, Facebook and the BBB by asking those clients to post there too.

Words To Know

Directory
a site that lists businesses: Yelp, Yellow Pages, MapQuest, Angi, the BBB.
Listing
your entry on a directory.
Yelp
the review site ChatGPT reads most for local businesses.
Better Business Bureau
a trust directory engines cite, with a grade per business.
Bing Places
Microsoft's free listing, feeding Copilot and ChatGPT's lookups.
Apple Business Connect
Apple's free listing, feeding Apple Maps and Siri.
Review velocity
how many new reviews arrive each month.

Don't Mix These Up

  • Stars vs words. The engine reads the sentences. A review that names the service and town does the work.
  • Old vs new. A hundred reviews from 2021 lose to ten from this month.
  • Google vs Yelp. Google's AI reads Google reviews. ChatGPT reads Yelp. Winning one and ignoring the other leaves half the engines blind.
CHAPTER 9

Getting Named On Other Sites: YouTube, Reddit, Lists

Chapter 4 showed that mentions on other people's sites outweigh everything else. This chapter is where those mentions come from: YouTube, Reddit, "best of" lists, local news and partners, and what to do on each without looking like a salesman.

Watch

Hostinger Academy, How to Use Reddit for SEO and AI Visibilityabout 9 minutes

Listen for: 30 minutes a week; answer, never pitch; find the threads that already rank; turn complaints into public fixes.

Nathan Gotch, pillars three and four, from 5:07 to the end

Listen for: export the sources ChatGPT cites and ask to be added; pay YouTubers; a paid mention counts the same as a free one.

Neil Patel, strategy two, from 2:33 to 4:04

Listen for: average content from a known name beats great content from a nobody; be consistent everywhere.

PushLeads, from 2:33 to 3:34 and 7:15 to 7:47

Listen for: YouTube mentions over backlinks; 10 to 20 minute videos with transcripts; roundups, sponsorships, Reddit as a disclosed business.

Read

What To Know

  • YouTube is the most cited site in Google's AI box and in AI Mode, and the strongest single predictor of AI visibility in Ahrefs' brand data. A ten-minute video reads to the engine like a 2,000-word article in natural question-and-answer language.
  • Long videos win. About 94% of YouTube citations go to full-length videos and under 6% to Shorts. Aim for 10 to 20 minutes, one tight question per video.
  • Upload the transcript with the video, and put the video on your site with the transcript under it. The engine reads words and the view count and comments act as trust.
  • Reddit has content deals with both OpenAI and Google, so its threads land in answers. Find the threads already ranking by searching Google for site:reddit.com plus your topic. Add the most complete, honest answer in the thread. Never pitch. Say who you are.
  • 30 minutes a week on Reddit is enough. Sort a relevant forum by hot or rising, answer where few have.
  • Watch for complaints about you or competitors. Fix yours in public and post the update. Competitors' complaints are a free list of what to promise.
  • Find the exact pages ChatGPT cites for your questions by running ten buying prompts in a fresh ChatGPT account and exporting the sources. Most will be "best of" lists you have never heard of. Email each one and ask to be included. Follow up three times.
  • A paid placement counts the same as an earned one to the engine, even when the link is marked sponsored. Sponsoring a local event, a chamber page or a supplier's "find an agent" list all count.
  • Pitch local news and "best Medicare agents in [city]" roundups. Give them something: a number, an interview, a quote.
  • YouTubers in your field will mention you for a fee. Their videos rank because Google owns YouTube. Cap outreach at 20 channels a day or YouTube blocks the account.
  • Consistency is a trust signal. Same name, same bio, same description of what you do on the website, LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, Yelp.
  • Social posts are read too. Grok leans on X posts, AI Mode on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. A short post that states a plain fact with a link to the full page gives the engine one more place to find you.

The mention campaign, monthly

  1. Run ten buying prompts in a fresh ChatGPT chat. Save every source it cites.
  2. Remove homepages and competitors. Keep the lists and articles.
  3. Email each list asking to be included, with one useful fact about your business. Follow up at day 3, 7 and 14.
  4. Answer three Reddit threads where the question is one you get every week.
  5. Record one ten-minute video answering one client question. Upload with transcript. Embed it on the matching service page.
  6. Post the same fact on LinkedIn and Facebook with a link to the page.

Words To Know

Roundup
a "best X in [city]" list article.
Listicle
any article that is a numbered list of options.
Subreddit
one forum on Reddit, each with its own rules.
Karma
Reddit's points for useful posts. Some forums will not let you post without some.
Disclosed business
saying who you are when you answer on a forum.
Sponsored mention
a paid placement that still counts to the engine.
Entity
the engine's idea of your business as one real thing, built from all the places it sees you described the same way.

Don't Mix These Up

  • Long videos vs Shorts. Shorts get views. Long videos get cited.
  • Answering vs pitching on Reddit. Answer and you get cited. Pitch and you get banned.
  • Link vs mention. You are chasing the mention. The link is a bonus.
CHAPTER 10

Measuring It And The 90-Day Plan

Clicks will not tell you if this is working, because the whole point is that fewer people click. This chapter is how to see where you stand in the engines, the free tools, and the order to do everything in the previous nine chapters, tuned for a Medicare agency and a local-service automation business.

Watch

Futurepedia, How to Get AI to Recommend Your Businessabout 13 minutes

Listen for: test in a temporary chat; the same question gets different answers in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity; 35% of sources were lists; sentiment, not just mentions.

PushLeads, from 9:54 to the end

Listen for: answers change by the hour so sample 10 to 50 prompts 5 to 10 times; the 90-day plan.

Read

What To Know

  • Measure mentions, not clicks. The new score is answer inclusion rate: out of the questions a client would ask, how many answers name you.
  • Test in a clean room. Use a temporary chat or a fresh account, or the engine's memory of you will skew the answer.
  • Sample, do not check once. Answers change by the hour. Run 10 to 50 real client questions, 5 to 10 times each, with location set to your service area, and count how often you appear.
  • Track three things per engine: whether you were mentioned, whether you were cited, and how you were described. A mention that says the wrong thing is worse than none.
  • Read the sources behind every answer where you are missing. In one study 35% were lists, then videos, then blogs. Homepages and product pages came far down. That list is your to-do list.
  • Free tools: Google Search Console's Generative AI report shows AI box and AI Mode impressions. Bing Webmaster Tools. Google Analytics has an AI assistants channel. Semrush and HubSpot both offer a free one-off AI visibility check.
  • Paid tools run from about $29 a month (Otterly) through $99 (Semrush AI Toolkit, per site) to several hundred (Ahrefs Brand Radar, Scrunch, Profound). HubSpot's AEO tool has a 28-day free trial and runs your prompts daily.
  • Watch your Search Console: impressions up and clicks down is the normal picture now, and it means you are being read.
  • Ask new clients how they found you. Many researched in ChatGPT before they ever called. Put the question on the intake form.
  • Tie it to money: count the leads and sales from the AI channel, not the visits.
  • If an agency handles your marketing and gives no AI report, it is running the 2019 playbook.

The 90-day plan

  1. Weeks 1 to 4: fix the plumbing (chapter 5). Allow the robots, check the firewall, test pages with JavaScript off, register Bing and Search Console, switch on the Generative AI report. Run the first prompt sample and write down the baseline.
  2. Weeks 1 to 4: complete the Google Business Profile (chapter 7). Every field, every service, every county.
  3. Months 1 to 3: claim and match every listing (chapter 8). Yelp, Bing, Apple, Facebook, BBB, Angi, the trade directories. Start the review engine with the "name the service and town" ask.
  4. Months 1 to 3: write the first ten question pages (chapter 6). Cost, deadlines, plan differences, each county served, "vs" pages for the two nearest competitors.
  5. Months 3 to 6: the mention campaign (chapter 9). Ten prompts exported monthly, list outreach, one long video a week with transcript, 30 minutes of Reddit a week, one local roundup pitch.
  6. Ongoing: re-run the prompt sample monthly, refresh the top ten pages every quarter, reply to every review, check the profile's AI summary.

For Complete Healthcare

  • The questions to sample: "best Medicare agent in [each county served]", "how much does a Medicare Advantage plan cost in Florida", "Medicare Supplement vs Medicare Advantage", "when is Medicare open enrollment", "Medicare agent near me that speaks Spanish", "who can help me switch Medicare plans".
  • Pages to write first: one per county served, one per plan type, one per enrollment window, one per carrier represented, and "what a Medicare agent does and what it costs you" (nothing).
  • The licence number, the states licensed in, and the carriers represented go in plain text near the top of the site. The engine fans out to "is this agent licensed" and needs to find the answer on your page.
  • Yelp and the BBB matter more here than in most trades because ChatGPT sends seniors' families there.
  • One long video a week answering one client question, posted to YouTube with the transcript and embedded on the matching page.

For The Automation Business

  • The questions to sample: "best lead follow-up automation for remodelers", "how do contractors respond to leads faster", "AI follow-up for home improvement leads", "alternatives to [the two biggest tools in the space]".
  • Pages to write first: one per trade served, "X vs Y" against the two biggest named tools, "what it costs", and a case study with a real number.
  • Mentions come from trade directories and roundups, contractor forums on Reddit, and YouTube walk-throughs of the system working.
  • ChatGPT and Perplexity matter more than Google's AI box for this buyer, because contractors research tools in chat.

Words To Know

Answer inclusion rate
the share of relevant questions where the answer names you.
Share of voice
your mentions as a share of all mentions in your category.
Temporary chat
a ChatGPT chat that uses no memory, for clean testing.
Impressions
how many times your page was shown, in an answer or a result, whether or not anyone clicked.
Generative AI report
the Search Console view of AI box and AI Mode showings.
Sentiment
whether the engine describes you well, badly or neutrally.
Baseline
the first measurement, taken before any changes, to judge the rest against.

Don't Mix These Up

  • Impressions vs clicks. Impressions rising while clicks fall is the goal, not a failure.
  • Mentioned vs described well. Check the words, not just the count.
  • One check vs a sample. One answer proves nothing. Fifty, repeated, is a measurement.