Showing Up in AI Search: What to Do When ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews Start Answering for You

A year ago, “where do I get good Thai food in Knoxville” went into Google. The answer was a list of links. You picked one. You went.

Today, the same person is just as likely to type that question into ChatGPT, or ask Siri, or watch Google’s own AI Overview answer it for them at the top of the search page. They get a sentence or two. Maybe a name. Maybe a list of three places. They go.

If your business is not in that sentence, it does not exist for that customer.

Here is the part nobody is being honest about: this is exactly the same problem as showing up on Google Maps. Same idea, new map. The mechanics are different, but the goal is identical: be the kind of business that the answer machine has every reason to recommend.

What “AI search” actually is

I am using “AI search” as a catch-all for three things that work a little differently but feel the same to your customer.

The first is a chat assistant: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot. Somebody types a question, it answers in plain English, sometimes with sources, sometimes without.

The second is the AI Overview that Google now sticks at the top of a regular search result. You searched for a roofer. Before the ten blue links, you get a paragraph that summarizes the answer.

The third is the voice assistants. Siri on iPhone, Alexa, Google Assistant. These have always pulled from search, but they are increasingly piping answers through a large language model first.

The shared thread: the customer gets a written-out answer instead of a list to click through. Whoever the answer mentions wins the call. Whoever it does not mention is invisible.

Who is actually using this for local searches? In Knoxville, plenty. Not because every grandma is on ChatGPT, but because Apple shipped Siri-with-AI to every iPhone, Google shows AI Overviews on regular searches, and the under-30 crowd has trained itself to ask Perplexity or ChatGPT for recommendations the same way a 40-year-old asks Google.

How AI assistants pick what to cite

This is the question every small business owner wants answered, and the honest answer is: nobody outside the AI labs knows the exact recipe, and the recipe changes weekly.

But the directional answer is clear. AI assistants pull from publicly readable sources that look authoritative. In practice that means the same handful of inputs over and over.

Your own website, if it can be read by a crawler.

Google Business Profile, Apple Business Connect, and Bing Places listings.

Review sites: Google reviews, Yelp, the industry-specific ones (TripAdvisor for restaurants, Healthgrades for medical, and so on).

Local news, neighborhood blogs, and community sites that mention the business in plain prose.

Wikipedia and structured-data sources, when they exist for the topic.

The pattern is the same one Google has always rewarded: real business, in a real place, that real people have written about somewhere on the open web.

What makes AI different is its hunger for plainly written content that directly answers a question. A page titled “Knoxville Plumbing Services | Local Plumber Near Me | Best Plumber 2024” is keyword-stuffing for old-school SEO and reads as untrustworthy to an AI. A page titled “Plumbing in Knoxville” with clear sections that say what you fix, where you work, and how to reach you reads exactly the way an AI wants to summarize.

The website side

If you do nothing else on the website, do these four things.

Make sure your content is plain HTML that loads without a JavaScript wall. AI crawlers, like search crawlers before them, are getting better at JavaScript, but “better” still means “skips a lot.” Static HTML that ships the actual words on first load is best.

Use descriptive headings that sound like questions or answers, not slogans. “What we do” beats “Excellence in service.” “Areas we serve in East Tennessee” beats “Our reach.”

Add an FAQ section anywhere it fits naturally. AI assistants love FAQ-style content because it maps cleanly to the question-and-answer format their users expect.

Add structured data: at minimum, an Organization or LocalBusiness schema in your site’s JSON-LD, and FAQPage schema if you have an FAQ section. This is invisible to humans but tells crawlers and AI assistants exactly what you are. If you do not know what JSON-LD is, your developer does.

Two more, slightly less critical but cheap. Put dates on your blog posts (AI assistants prefer recent sources for anything time-sensitive), and have a real /about page that says who you are, where you are, and what you do, in three plain paragraphs. Half the sites we look at have an /about page that is a stock photo and the word “Excellence.”

The off-site side

The website is necessary, not sufficient. AI assistants weight their citations heavily toward what other sources say about you.

Claim your three map listings: Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect. We covered the how in the SEO post. These three are the foundation that everything else builds on.

Get real reviews. Not bought ones, not bot ones. Ask your last ten happy customers. AI assistants notice review counts and recency, and they notice when the reviews read like real humans instead of templates.

Make sure your name, address, and phone are identical across every listing and on your website. “Suite 101” on Google and “Ste. 101” on your site looks like two different businesses to a search engine, and AI assistants are not yet smart enough to reconcile the two.

If your industry has a respected directory or trade body, get listed there. Knoxville Chamber, BBB if it is meaningful in your industry, the relevant local association. AI assistants pick these up.

If your business is genuinely interesting, get one piece written about you in a real local outlet: Knox News, Compass Knox, a neighborhood blog. One real article in a real place is worth more than a hundred press-release distributions.

What does not move the needle

There is already an “AI SEO” cottage industry growing up, and most of it is the same nonsense as the old SEO cottage industry, repackaged.

AI-generated word-salad blog posts. The reason an AI-written post does not help you rank in AI search is that AI assistants can recognize their own slop. They do not weight it.

“AI optimization” tools that promise to inject magic schema or train ChatGPT on your business. ChatGPT does not learn from a tool somebody bought. The honest version of this work is the four website fixes above plus the off-site listings, and you can do most of it yourself.

Stuffing structured data with fields you do not actually have. If you mark up your business as having 4.8 stars and 200 reviews when you have 4.2 stars and 17, an AI that reads your real Google profile will catch the mismatch and downgrade you for it.

A first-week checklist for a Knoxville small business

Day 1: Claim or audit your Google Business Profile, Bing Places, and Apple Business Connect listings. Make sure all three say the exact same thing.

Day 2: Add an Organization or LocalBusiness JSON-LD block to your website’s <head>. If you do not have one, ask whoever built your site to add it.

Day 3: Walk through your website without a logged-in account, on a phone. Note anything that is empty, vague, or hidden behind clicks.

Day 4: Add or rewrite the /about page so it says, in plain prose, who you are, where you are, and what you do.

Day 5: Add an FAQ section to your site with five real questions customers actually ask.

Day 6: Ask three recent happy customers for a Google review.

Day 7: Search for your business in ChatGPT and Perplexity. See what they say. Note what is missing or wrong.

That last one is the closest thing to a feedback loop you have. The answer machines are talking about you whether you check or not. Check.

Same map, new surface

The phrase “search engine optimization” has always been a bad name. What we are really talking about is being the kind of business that a stranger, using whatever tool they prefer, can find and trust on the day they need you.

In 2010 that meant Google. In 2018 it meant Google Maps. In 2026 it also means whatever Siri reads aloud, what ChatGPT cites, and what the Google AI Overview summarizes at the top of a search.

Same idea. New map. If you do the boring work of being clearly findable, you will be on it.

If you want a second pair of eyes on how a customer’s question about your business actually gets answered today, write us. It usually takes us about an hour to look at your AI footprint and tell you the two or three things that would change the answer.