What Is AI Search — And How Do I Make Sure My Business Appears In It?
Something has changed in the way people search for information online, and it's starting to affect where small businesses get found. If you've used Google recently and noticed it now often gives you a direct answer at the top of the page rather than a list of links, you've seen AI search in action. And if you've asked ChatGPT or a similar tool "who's the best web designer in Yorkshire" or "recommend a natural medicine manufacturer in the UK," you've used AI search to find a business.
This shift matters, and I want to explain what it means in practical terms for small business owners.
What's actually changed
For most of the internet's history, search worked like an index. You typed a query, the search engine returned a list of relevant pages, and you clicked through to find your answer.
AI-powered search works differently. Tools like ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot read and synthesise information from across the web and give you a direct answer — often without you needing to click anywhere at all. When someone asks "who should I hire to design my website in Whitby," the AI tool doesn't just return a list of results. It makes a recommendation based on everything it's been able to read and learn about the options.
That's a significant change. Being on page one of Google has always mattered. Being the business that an AI tool recommends when someone asks a relevant question is the new version of that.
Why some businesses are already appearing in AI recommendations
One of my client's businesses — Nature's Laboratory, a natural medicine manufacturer I worked with as Director of Technology — is now the number one recommendation when you ask ChatGPT to suggest a "natural medicine manufacturer UK." That didn't happen by accident.
It happened because of a sustained effort over several years to publish detailed, credible, specific content about what they do: who they work with, what their products contain, what their manufacturing standards are, what makes them different. When an AI tool reads everything it can find about natural medicine manufacturers in the UK and tries to decide which one to recommend, it finds that Nature's Laboratory has more high-quality, trustworthy information available about it than most of its competitors.
The same principle applies to your business.
What AI tools are looking for
AI tools are trying to give their users the most reliable, specific, and credible answer they can. That means they favour:
Specificity over generality. "I work with small businesses in Whitby and the surrounding North Yorkshire coast, specialising in WordPress development, ecommerce, and ongoing SEO support" is more useful to an AI tool than "I'm a passionate web professional dedicated to helping businesses thrive online."
Consistent, factual information across multiple sources. If your website, your Google Business Profile, your LinkedIn, and other places your business appears all tell the same story with the same details, that consistency builds credibility.
Content that directly answers questions. FAQ sections, guides, how-to articles — content structured around the questions your potential clients are actually asking performs well in AI search, because AI tools are essentially trying to answer questions.
Proof of expertise. Case studies, specific project outcomes, named clients (with permission), testimonials with detail — all of this gives AI tools evidence to draw on when deciding whether to recommend you.
Clear structured information. Schema markup — a way of annotating your website's content so that search engines and AI tools can understand it more easily — is increasingly important. Adding structured data that explicitly identifies your business, your location, your services, and your contact details makes it significantly easier for AI tools to extract and use that information accurately.
What you can do about it
The good news is that most of what helps with AI search also helps with traditional SEO. It's not a completely different discipline — it's an evolution of the same principles, with some additional considerations.
Specifically, I'd recommend:
Make sure your website content is clear, specific, and regularly updated. Thin, generic content is increasingly invisible to AI tools. Detailed, specific, genuine expertise is what gets cited.
Write content that answers the questions your clients are asking. FAQ pages, guides, explanations of how you work, honest answers to questions about pricing and timelines — this is exactly the kind of content AI tools pull from when answering user queries.
Add schema markup to your key pages. At minimum, your homepage and contact page should have LocalBusiness or ProfessionalService schema that makes your name, location, phone number, and services clearly machine-readable.
Build a consistent presence across multiple platforms. Your website, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, and any relevant directories should all tell a consistent story about who you are and what you do.
Publish case studies and proof of work. Specific, detailed accounts of real projects — with outcomes where possible — are among the most credible content an AI tool can find about your business.
I'm genuinely interested in this area and have been watching how it develops closely. If you want to talk through what it means for your business specifically — and what practical steps would make the most difference — I'd love to have that conversation.