Australian searches about AI search visibility more than doubled in a year. GOJI pulled the numbers and set out five steps any business can take to be the one AI recommends.
To show up in ChatGPT and AI search, your business needs five things: a website AI crawlers can read, strong rankings in normal search, pages that answer customer questions in the first lines, mentions on third-party sites AI trusts, and the same business details everywhere. None of it needs a new website but most of it is work your SEO should already be doing.
The question is no longer niche. A customer who once typed "plumber Brunswick" into Google now asks ChatGPT who to call, what it costs and who is good. The answer names a few businesses and if yours isn't one of them, then that customer never sees you.
So, where do AI answers come from and how can your business show up?
AI search tools build their answers from pages they can find and trust. When ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI Overviews answer a question about a local service, they search the web, read the top results and summarise them. Often those results are not your website and could be directories, "best of" roundups, review sites, industry bodies and news articles.
That is why a good business can be invisible. Earlier this year GOJI scored 1,459 AI answers about what Australian services cost, across 100 businesses in 10 industries and small businesses only appeared in about 5% of them. The full results are in the Australian AI Visibility Index.
AI doesn't pick the best business; it picks the one it can find, read and verify.
Five simple steps to show up in ChatGPT and AI search
1. Let the AI crawlers in
AI tools can only quote pages they are allowed to read. Check your robots.txt file, or run GOJI’s free AI Crawler Check extension for Chrome, which shows which AI crawlers your site lets in and which it blocks.
OpenAI lists its crawlers, including the one ChatGPT search uses, on its crawler documentation page. Blocking them by accident is more common than you'd think, especially on sites with aggressive security settings.
While you're there, verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools. Google gets the attention, but several AI tools draw on other search indexes too. It takes 15 minutes.
2. Rank in normal search first
AI search sits on top of regular search, also known as traditional SEO. Google says there is no special trick for its AI features: a page needs to be indexed and eligible to appear in search, and the usual SEO basics apply. Its guidance for site owners is short and worth reading.
In practice, the pages that rank on page one are the pages AI reads. If you're not ranking for the questions your customers ask, start there.
3. Answer the question in the first lines
AI tools lift answers, not essays and mostly get their answers form the first paragraph or two. Write each service page and article so the answer comes first, in one or two plain sentences then add the detail.
These three habits help:
Use the questions customers ask as your subheadings.
State facts AI can quote: what you do, where, for whom, and what it costs.
Publish your prices, or at least a range. AI answers to cost questions quote numbers. If yours aren't public, the answer quotes someone else's.
4. Get named on the sites AI trusts
This is the step most businesses skip, and it matters as much as your own site. As mentioned earlier, AI answers lean on third-party sources: industry directories, "best of" lists, review platforms, association member pages and media coverage.
Search your main service and suburb in ChatGPT and Perplexity, then look at the sources they cite, but try to do this while logged out or in a private window so the results aren’t skewed towards your search history. Those are the sites to be on. Ask clients for reviews, claim every relevant directory listing, and pitch the publications your customers read.
5. Keep your details the same everywhere
AI checks facts against more than one source. If your business name, address, phone number (referred to as NAP) or service list differs between your website, Google Business Profile and directories, AI has less reason to trust any of them.
Pick one version and use it everywhere. Then add structured data to your site, such as the LocalBusiness schema, so machines can read those details without guessing.
How do you check if you show up?
Ask the AI the questions your customers ask, and write down what it says. Pick ten questions, such as "who's the best [service] in [suburb]" and "how much does [service] cost in [city]". Run them in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Mode once a month. Remember to do this in a private window, logged out of your accounts and on a separate device from your usual if possible.
For each answer, record three things:
Were you named?
Who was named instead?
Which sources did the AI cite?
The third column is your to-do list because answers change from day to day, so one check tells you very little. The trend over three to six months tells you whether the work is actually landing.
Done by hand, this takes a few hours a month. As an AI SEO agency, GOJI runs it with its own systems, so rank capture, AI answer tracking and report assembly happen without anyone copying and pasting. The team's hours go into the strategy and the fixes instead.
Making sense of the jargon, and what to do next.
Is AEO different from SEO?
AEO (answer engine optimisation) builds on SEO rather than replacing it. SEO gets your pages ranked while AEO makes sure the AI that reads those pages can quote you, trust you and find you named elsewhere. You need both, and most of the work overlaps.
What is the difference between AEO and GEO?
Very little in practice. GEO (generative engine optimisation) and AEO are two names for the same goal: being named in AI-generated answers. Australian searches for "aeo vs geo" went from about 120 to more than 1,000 in a year, which says more about the industry's naming problem than about two different disciplines.
Can I pay to appear in ChatGPT?
Ads and recommendations are different things. An ad is labelled as an ad and a recommendation in an AI answer is earned through the five steps above, and it is the one customers trust.
How long does it take?
Crawler and website fixes can show up within weeks. Third-party mentions, reviews and rankings take months to build. Measure monthly and judge the trend over a quarter or two.
Do I need a new website?
Usually not. Most businesses can make these changes on the site they have. A rebuild only makes sense if the current site can't be crawled, edited or kept fast.
Where to start this week
Pick the one question your best customers ask before they hire you. Ask it in ChatGPT tonight. Look at who gets named, and which sites the answer cites.
That one answer tells you more than any report and it shows the gap between the business you've built and the business AI can see. For most businesses, closing that gap is ordinary work, and fortunately not an entire rebuild: a crawler setting, a clearer page, the right listings and a steady flow of reviews can make all the difference.
The demand is already here with Australian searches about AI visibility more than doubling in a year, and customers are asking the AI directly. The businesses that act now get named while the answers are still settling. Wait a year, and you'll be competing with the ones that did.