How do AI search tools decide which businesses to name?
They read what is written about you, on your own site and everywhere else, and they lean on the live search results as a starting point. When somebody asks ChatGPT or Gemini for a recommendation, the tool runs searches behind the scenes, reads the pages that come back, weighs how consistently they describe each business, and writes an answer naming the ones it is most confident about. Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode do much the same with Google’s own index.
So the ingredients are familiar. Pages that rank, a Google Business Profile with reviews, mentions on trade bodies, directories and local press, and a name that is written the same way everywhere. What the AI adds is a preference for clarity: a business described in plain sentences gets understood, and a business hidden behind slogans gets skipped.
Is AI search different from ordinary SEO?
It overlaps heavily and it is a separate job. Ranking well helps, because the AI reads the results, but it is possible to be first on Google and absent from the answer, and the reverse happens too. The trade calls the extra work generative engine optimisation, or GEO, and you will see the American spelling, generative engine optimization, in most of what is written about it. The name matters less than the idea: being understood and corroborated, as well as ranked.
The measure is different as well. SEO is measured by position and clicks. AI visibility is measured by asking the tools the questions your customers ask and noting whether you are named, which is a thing you can do yourself this afternoon.
What should your website say so an AI can understand it?
The plain facts, near the top, in ordinary sentences. Who you are, what you do, where you do it, who you do it for, how long you have done it and what proves it. Dolphin Heating’s site says Fay is a Gas Safe registered engineer in Huddersfield with more than 25 years in the trade, and that is why it is named in the AI answer for female gas engineer Huddersfield: there was nothing to guess.
Question-shaped headings with the answer in the first sentence help, because that is the shape the tools lift. So do named projects in named places, a page per service, and structured data that repeats the same facts in a form machines read directly. What does not help is a homepage that opens with a slogan and makes the reader scroll to find out what the company does.
- Name, trade, town and coverage in the first paragraph
- A page for each service, written in the customer’s words
- Projects and jobs named with the place they were done
- Reviews on the site as well as on Google
- The same name, address and phone number everywhere
- Structured data carrying the same facts
Do reviews and other websites matter more for AI than for Google?
Yes. An AI answer is built on corroboration, so what other people say about you carries more weight than it does in ordinary ranking. Google reviews are the biggest single source, and so are trade-body listings, supplier pages that name you as an approved installer, local press, and the directories that are actually read in your trade. Bond Brickwork is recommended by AI search for commercial brickwork, and the reason is consistency: the site, the profile and the named developments all tell the same story about the same company.
That means the work is partly off your own site. Getting mentioned accurately in the right places is closer to PR than to traditional SEO, and it is where the Yorkshire businesses that appear in AI answers tend to be quietly ahead.
How do you check what AI says about your business now?
Ask it. Open ChatGPT, Gemini and Google with AI Mode, and type the questions a customer would: who is a good roofing contractor in Wakefield, recommend a commercial solicitor in Leeds, which accountants in Harrogate work with contractors. Note who is named, what is said about them, and which websites the answer cites. Do it for each service and town you care about, and repeat it monthly, because the answers change.
Then read what it says about you specifically, by name. If it is out of date, wrong about your services, or muddles you with a similarly named firm in Sheffield, that is a list of things to fix on your own pages and profiles.
Can anyone guarantee an AI will recommend you?
No. The answers are generated fresh each time, vary between tools and change month to month, and nobody outside those companies controls them. Anyone promising you a place in ChatGPT’s answer is selling something they do not have.
What can be done is to make you the easiest business in your town to understand and the best corroborated, and then to measure it honestly. That is what the Dolphin and Bond examples show: neither was promised anything, both are named.
