Christopher Mollard — founder of J4G Design, a Fulham design studio with twenty years of design experience.
Last updated 10 Nov 2026
Being recommended by AI matters because a growing share of your future customers now ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google’s AI Overviews who to hire before they ever scroll through a list of websites, and the assistant usually names only a handful of businesses in its answer, so if yours isn’t one of them you simply aren’t in the conversation. The good news is that AI visibility is earned in a fairly understandable way, through clear evidence of the work you do, consistent mentions of your business around the web, pages that answer the questions buyers actually ask, and a website that AI tools are able to read, and this guide walks through each of those in turn.
If you’d like the background on answer engine optimisation first, I’ve covered that in What is AEO?, so here I’ll focus on why it matters and what makes a business the one an assistant recommends.
Why does AI visibility matter for a small business?
When someone types a search into Google they are shown ten blue links and a map, and they will often open three or four of them and compare, which gives a business on the second or third line a fair chance of being considered. When the same person asks an AI assistant “who’s a good builder in Fulham?” or “which web designer should I use for a small charity website?”, they tend to receive a short, confident paragraph that names two or three businesses with a sentence about each, and many people take that shortlist at face value.
That shift changes what being visible means. Ranking well on Google is still enormously valuable, and most of the work that helps you there helps here too, but a business can sit comfortably on the first page of Google and still be absent from the answer an assistant gives, because the assistant is choosing the businesses it can describe most confidently rather than simply the ones at the top of a list. The people who arrive through those answers also tend to be further along in their decision, because the assistant has already explained why you might suit them.
What have we seen on our own website?
We watch this closely on j4gdesign.co.uk, and between September and October 2026 the number of visits arriving from ChatGPT roughly tripled, from eleven sessions to thirty-five. Those are modest numbers, but what interested me most was where those visitors landed, because the large majority went straight to our case studies and our portfolio of work rather than to the homepage or a service page.
That tells you something useful about how these assistants decide who to mention. A case study such as our write-up on doubling the number of booked estimates for a house painting company contains a specific type of client, a specific place, a specific problem and a specific outcome, which is exactly the kind of concrete, quotable evidence an assistant can lean on when it explains why a business might be a good fit for the person asking. A page that says “we deliver great results for our clients” gives it nothing to work with, whereas a page that describes what happened, where and for whom gives it a reason to name you.
How do you get your business recommended by ChatGPT and other AI assistants?
People often ask me how to rank in ChatGPT as though there were a single setting to switch on, and while there isn’t, there is a fairly consistent pattern behind the businesses that get mentioned. This is the approach we use for our own site and our SEO clients, and most of it is good practice for your customers anyway.
Evidence pages an assistant can cite
The single most useful thing most businesses can do is publish proper case studies, each one describing a particular project with the place, the problem you were asked to solve, the approach you took and what changed as a result. These pages give an assistant the specifics it needs to recommend you with confidence, and because they are written about real work they also reassure the human visitor who clicks through to check you out. Reviews play a similar role, which is why a well-kept Google Business Profile, with a steady habit of asking happy customers for a review, sits alongside the website in this work.
Consistent mentions of your business elsewhere
Assistants build their picture of a business from more than its own website, so it helps a great deal when the same name, address, phone number and description appear consistently across the directories that rank for “best X in Y” searches, in local press, on partners’ websites and in the community forums your customers read. Each consistent mention reinforces the others, so over time the assistant becomes certain enough about who you are and where you work to put your name forward.
Pages that answer the questions buyers ask
People talk to assistants in full questions, such as how to choose a particular kind of supplier, what is involved in a project, how long it usually takes, or how one option compares with another, and the businesses that get quoted are very often the ones whose websites answer those questions plainly. That might mean a thoughtful FAQ on each service page or a handful of articles written around the questions you hear on every first call. This is also where llm SEO and ordinary SEO overlap most, because a page that answers a question clearly tends to serve Google, the assistant and the reader equally well.
A website AI tools can actually read
The final layer is technical, and it is the one most often overlooked. Some websites block AI crawlers without their owners ever knowing, sometimes through a security setting in a service like Cloudflare, so the first step is making sure the crawlers used by ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity are allowed in. We also add an llms.txt file, which is a short, structured summary of the site written for AI tools, and we make sure the site is properly indexed in Bing with IndexNow switched on so that new pages are picked up quickly, because ChatGPT’s search draws heavily on Bing’s index and a site that Bing hasn’t seen is far less likely to appear in a ChatGPT answer.
Is ChatGPT SEO different from ordinary SEO?
There is a great deal of overlap, and in our experience the businesses that do well in AI answers are usually the ones that already had solid foundations in place, with clear structure, accurate schema, fast pages and a steady flow of genuinely useful content. What changes is the emphasis, since chatgpt SEO leans harder on evidence, on consistency of mentions across the web and on content shaped around questions, while traditional SEO places more weight on rankings, links and search volumes. We’ll explore that comparison in a forthcoming article, but for most small businesses the sensible path is to treat them as one joined-up piece of work rather than two separate projects, which is how we approach it within our SEO service.
How can you tell whether AI is recommending you?
The simplest check is to ask. We keep a fixed set of buyer questions for each client, the kind of thing a real customer would type, and run them through ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity each month so we can see who is being named and how that changes over time. Alongside that, Google Analytics can show visits from AI assistants as their own channel, and the pages those visitors land on tell you which of your pages the assistants find most useful.
Frequently asked questions
How long does it take to appear in ChatGPT answers?
It varies with how established your business already is online, but changes to your website and mentions elsewhere usually take a few weeks to a few months to be reflected. Getting indexed in Bing with IndexNow switched on tends to shorten the wait for new pages, and the effect builds gradually as more consistent evidence accumulates.
Can I pay to be recommended by ChatGPT?
No, the recommendations in an assistant’s ordinary answers can’t be bought in the way a search advert can. They come from what the assistant can find and trust about your business, which is why evidence, consistent mentions and clear answers matter so much.
Do I need a new website to improve my AI visibility?
Usually not, because much of the work involves adding case studies, improving the answers on existing pages and fixing technical settings such as crawler access and Bing indexing. A rebuild only makes sense when the current site makes those changes unusually difficult.
Is llms.txt enough on its own?
It’s a helpful signal and quick to add, but on its own it won’t make an assistant recommend you. It works best as one part of the wider picture, alongside evidence pages, consistent mentions and content that answers your buyers’ questions.
Where to go from here
If you’re curious about how your business currently appears when someone asks an assistant for a recommendation in your field, we’d be happy to take a look with you. Our AEO service starts by checking where you show up in AI search today and what would make the biggest difference, and it can run as a one-off audit and plan or as part of ongoing SEO support, whichever suits where your business is right now.