AI SEO: how to get found in ChatGPT and AI Overviews

AI SEO is the work of making your business likely to be found, understood and cited by AI search tools: Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT search, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot. It is a new label on mostly familiar work, plus a few genuinely new details. This post separates what is known from what is guesswork, because a lot of what is being sold under this name is the second kind.

If you are new to SEO in general, start with our plain English guide to SEO in New Zealand. This post assumes the basics.

What do you call SEO for AI?

There is no settled name. You will see GEO (generative engine optimisation), AEO (answer engine optimisation), LLMO (large language model optimisation), AI search optimisation and simply AI SEO. They all describe roughly the same goal: being a source an AI answer draws on and links to. The names are mostly marketing; the work underneath is what matters.

What are the most popular AI search engines?

Google is still where most New Zealanders search, so AI Overviews is the one to prioritise. But the work below helps across all of them.

What is known, and what is speculation

Things that are reasonably well established, mostly because the companies have said so:

• Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode use its normal ranking and indexing systems, and that the same SEO best practices apply. A page has to be indexed and eligible to show a snippet to be used.
• AI answers usually cite web pages, and those citations often come from pages that also rank well for related searches.
• Each AI company publishes the names of its crawlers, and most say they respect robots.txt.
• Structured data helps search engines understand a page, as long as it matches what is visible.

Things that are claimed often but not proven:

• That specific formats, word counts or phrasings reliably get you cited. Some studies suggest patterns, but the systems change often and none publish their selection rules.
• That an llms.txt file improves visibility. See below.
• That any tool can accurately tell you your 'AI ranking'. AI answers vary by wording, user, location and time, so visibility tools are sampling, not measuring.

Write clear, factual pages that answer questions

AI tools pull short passages that answer a question directly. Pages that are easy to quote tend to share a few traits:

• A heading that matches a real question, followed by a direct answer in the first sentence or two, then the detail
• Specific facts: what is included, where you operate, how long things take, what the process is
• Plain language, short paragraphs, and lists or tables where the content is genuinely a list or a comparison
• Evidence of experience: real examples, named places, the reasoning behind a recommendation
• Up to date information, with dates where they matter

This is just good writing for the web, which is the point. Our posts on SEO basics for a new website and content marketing for small NZ businesses cover how to choose what to write.

Add structured data that matches the page

Structured data (schema markup) labels things on a page in a format machines read easily: this is the business name, this is the address, these are the opening hours, this is a question and its answer. For most small businesses the useful types are Organization or LocalBusiness, Service, Product, Article and FAQPage where a real FAQ exists.

There is no public evidence that schema on its own gets you into AI answers, but it removes ambiguity, and ambiguity is a common reason a business is described wrongly. Our free schema markup generator writes the common types. Only mark up what a visitor can actually see on the page.

Be cited and mentioned by others

AI tools tend to repeat what many trusted sources agree on. If the only place that says you are a leading Dunedin landscaper is your own website, that claim carries little weight. Mentions elsewhere help:

• Reviews on Google and relevant industry sites. See our guide on how to get Google reviews.
• Listings with trade associations, suppliers and local business groups
• Local news coverage and community sites
• Being named in comparisons, roundups and forums where people discuss your industry

This is the same authority building that helps ordinary rankings. There is no shortcut that works reliably; paid mentions and fake reviews carry real risk.

Check crawler access in robots.txt

Your robots.txt file tells crawlers what they may fetch. Some sites block AI crawlers by default, sometimes through a hosting or security setting nobody remembers switching on. Check yours by visiting yourdomain.co.nz/robots.txt.

The useful distinction is between search crawlers, which can send you visitors, and training crawlers, which collect content for future models. Many businesses allow the search ones and make a deliberate choice about the training ones. Crawler names and purposes change, so check each company's current documentation. Our robots.txt generator builds a file with these choices in plain English.

Keep your business details consistent everywhere

AI tools and search engines build a picture of your business as an entity: a name, a location, what you do, who runs it. When those details differ between your website, Google Business Profile, Facebook page and directories, the picture gets blurry, and AI answers are more likely to get things wrong or leave you out.

• Use the same business name, address and phone number everywhere, character for character
• Describe what you do in consistent terms across your site and profiles
• Link your official social profiles from your site, and mark them up with the sameAs property in your structured data
• Keep your Google Business Profile complete and current

What about llms.txt?

llms.txt is a proposed file that sits at the root of a site and gives language models a plain text summary of the important pages. It is optional and unofficial. Google has said it does not use llms.txt for Search or AI Overviews, and there is little public evidence that other major AI tools rely on it.

It is cheap to add and harmless, so there is no reason not to if your developer offers. Just do not pay extra for it on the promise of AI visibility, and do not let it distract from the work above.

How to measure AI search visibility

Measurement is immature, so combine a few imperfect signals:

• Search Console. AI Overviews and AI Mode clicks and impressions are included in the normal performance report, though not separated out.
• GA4 referral traffic. Visits from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and copilot.microsoft.com show up as referrals. Numbers are often small but worth watching.
• Manual checks. Ask the tools the questions your customers ask, such as 'who does commercial cleaning in Nelson', and note whether you appear and what is said. Repeat monthly, since results vary.
• Ask new customers. 'ChatGPT recommended you' is increasingly a real answer, and it only shows up if you ask.

The short version

Good SEO is most of AI SEO. Make sure you can be crawled, write pages that answer questions directly and accurately, keep your details consistent, earn genuine mentions, and measure enquiries. Check a page with our SEO checker to see the basics, and if you want a hand, our SEO services for NZ businesses include AI search checks as part of the audit. Contact us for a fixed written quote.