Picture someone in Athlone typing “best accountant for tradespeople near me” into ChatGPT instead of Google. They get a confident answer with two or three business names. No scrolling. No list of ten blue links. Nobody clicked through to a website at all.
That’s not a hypothetical anymore. It’s happening every day, across every county in Ireland, for all kinds of searches your customers used to run through Google.
Here’s the uncomfortable question: do you know if your business ever comes up in those answers? For most small business owners I talk to, the honest answer is no idea.
This is what’s now called AI search optimisation, or answer engine optimisation. It’s not a fad you can safely ignore, and it’s genuinely changing how people find local businesses. The good news is that fixing it rarely means rebuilding your website from scratch. It usually means restructuring what’s already there.
In this post, I’ll walk you through what AI search optimisation actually means, how it’s different from the SEO advice you already know, and a simple check you can run on your own site this afternoon.
More people are typing questions into ChatGPT, Perplexity, or reading Google’s AI Overview instead of scrolling through search results. ChatGPT alone had grown to roughly 900 million weekly active users by February 2026, more than double what it had less than a year before.
Researchers from the Indian School of Business and Carnegie Mellon found that when an AI Overview appears above the normal results, organic clicks on the page underneath it drop by around 38 percent. That’s a large share of people who used to land on a website simply not clicking through anymore, because the AI already gave them an answer.
It’s not all bad news for small businesses, though. The same research pointed to a separate finding from BrightEdge: being cited inside an AI Overview can actually lift clicks on your other organic listings by around 35 percent, because being mentioned by the AI builds trust before a visitor even lands on your page.
So the businesses losing out aren’t the ones losing traffic. They’re the ones the AI tools never mention in the first place.
Traditional SEO is about getting your page to appear in a list of links. AI search optimisation is about getting a language model to trust your page enough to summarise, paraphrase, or name your business directly when it answers someone’s question.
That’s a genuinely different job. A search engine ranks pages. An AI model selects sources it believes it can quote accurately and stand behind. It doesn’t favour pages stuffed with keywords, and it isn’t impressed by a page that just repeats the same phrase five times hoping to rank for it.
Old SEO asks: how do I get clicked? AI search optimisation asks: how do I become the source the AI trusts enough to mention by name? That single shift in thinking changes how you should be writing and structuring your pages.
This isn’t a reason to throw out everything you know about SEO. If you’ve read my earlier post on the six pages every small business website needs, that foundation still matters. Google’s AI Overview pulls its answers largely from pages that are already indexed, already ranking, and already considered trustworthy for a topic. A site with weak structure and no clear content has nothing for the AI to work with in the first place.
Where it gets more specific is with tools like Perplexity, which leans heavily on original data, statistics, and proprietary detail when choosing what to cite. That’s exactly why I told you in the testimonials section of that earlier post to get specific numbers into your reviews. A testimonial that says a client saved a real, quantified amount is precisely the kind of detail an AI model can confidently repeat. A testimonial that just says “great service” gives it nothing to work with.
Question-phrased headers. Write your subheadings the way a customer would actually type a question into ChatGPT. “How much does a website cost in Ireland?” works better for AI citation than a clever, vague heading like “Pricing Made Simple.”
A real FAQ section. Four to six genuine questions with clear two to four sentence answers is, according to current industry guidance, one of the highest-return structural elements for getting cited by AI tools right now. Not a decorative accordion full of boilerplate. Actual questions your customers ask you on the phone.
Entity density. Use explicit names. Your county, your certifications, the standards you work to, the specific services you offer. Vague language forces an AI model to guess. Specific language lets it disambiguate you from every other business like yours.
Visible source attribution. If you’re citing a statistic or a claim, say where it came from and link to it. Ironically, being transparent about your own sources is one of the things that makes AI models more willing to treat you as a trustworthy source in turn.
Basic structured data. Schema markup such as FAQPage, LocalBusiness, or Article tags gives AI systems a clean, machine-readable way to understand who said what on your page. If you’re not sure whether your site has this, ask your web developer. It’s usually a small, one-off job.
A vague About page. If it doesn’t say clearly who you help and where, an AI model has no entity to attach to your business.
No FAQ content anywhere on the site. If customers ask you the same five questions every week, and none of those answers exist in writing on your website, you’re leaving free citation opportunities on the table.
Keyword stuffing. AI models are, if anything, more sensitive to this than Google. A page that reads like it was written for a search engine rather than a person is exactly the kind of page these tools are built to avoid quoting.
Inconsistent business details. If your name, address, and phone number are slightly different on your website, Google Business Profile, and directory listings, that inconsistency makes it harder for AI tools to confirm who you actually are, particularly for local “near me” style queries.
Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google and ask it a question a real customer might ask about your service and your area. Does your business come up at all?
Does any single page on your website answer that exact question directly, in plain language, without making the reader dig for it?
Do you have a genuine FAQ section, built from the actual questions customers ask you, rather than generic filler?
Are your business name, address, and phone number identical everywhere they appear online?
Does at least one page on your site include a specific, real number or outcome rather than a general claim?
Do you know whether your site has basic schema markup? If you don’t know, that’s worth asking your developer about this week.
If you answered no to most of these, that’s not a crisis. It’s just your starting point.
I’ll be straight with you: this is a genuinely new area. I haven’t yet run a before-and-after test on a client site and measured a change in AI citations, and I’d be cautious of anyone in Ireland who claims they’ve cracked a reliable formula for it. The AI models themselves change constantly, and none of them publish exactly how they decide what to cite.
What I’ve laid out above is drawn from current, credible industry guidance and from applying the same structural thinking that’s always underpinned good SEO and good web design. It’s a solid, sensible starting point. It isn’t a guarantee, and anyone who promises you guaranteed ChatGPT citations for a fee is telling you more about their sales pitch than about how these models actually work.
That honesty matters more here than almost anywhere else in web design right now, because the businesses selling certainty in this space are, by definition, overselling it.
These changes matter more for some businesses than others. If most of your customers come through word of mouth or a trades directory rather than search, this is a lower priority than getting your basic six pages right first.
And AI search optimisation doesn’t replace ordinary SEO. It sits alongside it. A site with no traditional search visibility isn’t going to leapfrog into AI answers just because it has a tidy FAQ section.
Whether someone types a question into Google or asks ChatGPT out loud, the underlying fix is largely the same: clear structure, honest and specific content, and real answers to real questions. Nothing here replaces the fundamentals. It builds on them.
Run the six-question audit above this week. Pick the one gap that stands out most and fix it first.
If you’d like a second pair of eyes on where your site stands, whether that’s the basics from my earlier post on the six essential pages or this newer question of AI visibility, I’d be happy to help.
Get in touch at innografik.ie and tell me a bit about your business. I’ll take an honest look and tell you where you stand, including where I’m still figuring things out myself.
