How to make your business appear in AI search: a small business guide

To make your business appear in AI search, make the facts about it easy for the engines to find, read and trust: check what they say today, let their crawlers in, keep your details identical everywhere, answer customer questions on your own pages, and earn mentions on sites they already cite. Then check again every month.

This guide is for small businesses without an SEO team. Every step can be done in an afternoon or two, and none needs a paid tool, though one saves time from step 7 on. We build Stellarcast, an AI visibility tool, so weigh our mentions of it accordingly.

1. Check what AI says about your business today

Ask the questions your customers ask, in their words: "best [your service] in [your town]", "[your business] reviews", "[your business] vs [a competitor]". Ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot, and search Google to see its AI Overviews and AI Mode. Write down who is named and which websites are cited. Ask each question twice, because the answers can differ between runs. Our free AI visibility audit does this across Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity in one go.

2. Let AI crawlers read your site

A blocked crawler cannot read your page, so engines may skip it or rely on what other sites say about you. Check your robots.txt, and check whether your host or CDN blocks AI bots by default; some security settings do. Our free AI crawler checker tests your site against each engine's crawlers, and our post on Cloudflare's AI crawler blocking covers the most common setting.

3. Keep your business facts identical everywhere

Your name, address, phone number, opening hours, services and prices should read the same on your website, your Google Business Profile, Bing Places for Business, Apple Business Connect and the directories in your industry. Engines assemble answers from many sources, and conflicting details can give them a reason to name someone else. Do not skip Bing: Microsoft Copilot draws on Bing's index (see how AI engines pick their sources), so claim your Bing Places listing as well as Google's.

4. Answer your customers' questions on your own pages

Write the answers to the questions from step 1 on your own site: a service page per service, a pricing page, a short FAQ. Lead each answer with the answer in the first sentence, then the detail. Put prices, service areas and hours in text, not only in images or PDFs. Our guide to writing content AI cites shows the pattern.

5. Add structured data, but do not expect it to do the work

LocalBusiness schema makes your name, address, hours and services unambiguous to machines, and it is cheap to add. The evidence that schema on its own earns AI citations is weak, though, so treat it as tidying rather than strategy. We cover both sides in schema markup for AEO and does schema get you cited by AI?.

6. Earn mentions where AI engines look

Engines often cite third-party pages about a business: review sites, local news, industry directories, partner pages and community threads. Ask happy customers for reviews on the platforms your industry uses, get listed in the directories that already appear in your step 1 answers, and offer local press something worth writing about. A mention without a link can still count; see brand mentions vs backlinks and how to appear in AI answers on Reddit.

7. Check again every month

Repeat step 1 with the same questions each month and note what changed. A spreadsheet is enough to start. When that takes too long, a tool can run the questions for you: Stellarcast checks Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode and Microsoft Copilot daily from $39 a month, and from $89 drafts fixes for the questions where a competitor is named instead of you. See the plans.

Do you need to pay anyone?

Not to start. Steps 1 to 6 cost time, not money. Pay for a tool when the monthly check takes longer than it is worth, and hire help when you do not have the hours to do the fixes. If you go the agency route, our guide on how to choose an AEO agency includes a section for small businesses. If your customers are local, our local AEO guide goes deeper on listings and reviews.