SEO for AI search, explained simply: getting found in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity
How AI assistants choose which businesses to mention, and the practical steps that make yours easier to recommend.
ToBrand team · 6 min read
More people now ask an AI assistant instead of typing into Google: "Which web designer in Pune is good for a small restaurant?" The assistant answers in a paragraph and names a few businesses. Getting into that answer is what people call AI search optimisation, GEO or LLM SEO. The good news: most of it is ordinary, honest SEO done well.
How AI assistants find answers
Tools like ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews search the web, read a handful of pages and summarise them, often with links to their sources. They favour pages that are easy to read, clearly answer the question and come from businesses that look established and consistent across the web.
1. Let them read your site
- Make sure your site isn't blocking search and AI crawlers in robots.txt (unless you choose to).
- Put important information in real text, not only inside images, PDFs or sliders.
- Keep the site fast and working on phones; slow pages get skipped.
- Consider adding an
llms.txtfile: a short plain-text summary of who you are and your key pages. It is a young, informal convention, but cheap to add. Here is ours.
2. Answer real questions plainly
Write the way customers ask. A page titled "Website design for restaurants in Pune" that says what you do, for whom, how long it takes and roughly what it costs is far easier to quote than a page of slogans. FAQ sections with direct answers work well, because AI answers are built from exactly those sentences.
3. Be specific about who, what and where
State your service, your city or areas, your prices or price ranges, and what makes you different, in plain words. Vague claims ("best quality, best service") give an assistant nothing to repeat.
4. Add structured data
Structured data (schema.org) labels facts for machines: business name, address, phone, opening hours, services, prices, FAQs, reviews. It helps Google and other systems read your details correctly. Our free SEO check tells you whether your site has it.
5. Be consistent and mentioned around the web
Assistants cross-check. Keep your name, address and phone identical on your website, Google Business Profile and directories. Real reviews, local news mentions, association memberships and helpful posts on other sites all add evidence that you are a real, trusted business.
6. Check how AI sees you
Ask a few assistants the questions your customers would ask, such as "best [your service] in [your area]", and note who gets named and which pages are cited. Repeat every couple of months. Results change between tools and over time, so look for patterns rather than one answer.
What not to do
- Don't publish dozens of thin, AI-written pages; they rarely help and can hurt.
- Don't hide text or stuff keywords; it doesn't fool modern systems.
- Don't promise clients "guaranteed ChatGPT rankings". Nobody controls those answers.
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