How to get your business recommended by AI search in 2026

Your customers are asking AI assistants who to hire and what to buy. ChatGPT has 900 million weekly users, and Google says AI Mode passed 1 billion monthly users in July 2026. When someone asks for “the best accountant for a small business in Leeds” and gets three names back, the businesses that aren’t named never get the chance to compete.

The good news: what gets a business recommended by AI search is mostly what makes it easy to find and trust online. Here’s how AI assistants choose which businesses to mention, and the nine steps we use with clients.

Why AI answers matter for your business

AI answers change how people click. In a Pew Research Center study of 900 US adults, people who saw a Google AI summary clicked a normal search result in 8% of visits, against 15% when there was no summary. They clicked a link inside the summary itself in just 1% of visits. Ahrefs found that AI Overviews cut the click-through rate of the top-ranking page by 58%, across 300,000 keywords studied in December 2025.

Fewer clicks doesn’t have to mean less business. Semrush estimates that the average visitor arriving from AI search is worth 4.4 times a traditional organic visitor, because they arrive having already compared their options. Local search is moving fast too: in BrightLocal’s 2026 survey, 45% of consumers had used ChatGPT or another AI tool for local recommendations, up from 6% a year earlier.

How AI assistants choose which businesses to mention

Most AI assistants answer buying questions in two steps. First they search: their own index, a partner search engine, or both. Then a language model reads the strongest results and writes an answer, usually naming the businesses that several sources agree on.

That second step is why reputation matters so much. In an Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands, the number of times a brand was mentioned across the web had a correlation of 0.664 with how often it appeared in Google’s AI Overviews. Backlinks scored 0.218. Correlation isn’t proof of cause, but the pattern is clear: AI tools recommend businesses that other people talk about.

Nine steps to get your business recommended

1. Let AI search crawlers read your site

Each AI company uses named crawlers, and your robots.txt file decides which ones can visit. For being recommended, the search crawlers matter most, not the ones that collect training data:

You can block training crawlers and still allow the search ones. Check your hosting and security settings too: in July 2025 Cloudflare started blocking AI crawlers by default, so a site can be invisible to AI search without anyone deciding that.

2. Make sure search engines have indexed you

AI answers lean on search indexes, so the basics still decide whether you can be found at all. Verify your site in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, submit your sitemap, and fix any important pages marked as not indexed. Bing also supports IndexNow, a simple way to tell search engines the moment a page is added or changed.

3. Say exactly what you do, for whom and where

Language models summarise, so make your facts easy to summarise. Your homepage and service pages should state what you offer, who it’s for, where you work and how pricing works. Use the same business name, contact details and description on your website, Google Business Profile, social profiles and directories. Conflicting details make it harder for any system to be confident about you.

4. Add structured data that matches the page

Structured data (schema.org markup, usually written as JSON-LD) labels the facts on a page so machines don’t have to guess. Google is clear that AI Overviews and AI Mode need no special markup, and that structured data must match what visitors can see. Start with Organization or LocalBusiness, a Service entry for each service, Article for blog posts and BreadcrumbList for your navigation. Test it with Google’s Rich Results Test and the Schema Markup Validator.

5. Publish answers, not slogans

AI assistants quote pages that answer questions clearly. Cover what customers ask before they buy: How much does it cost? How long does it take? How do you compare with the alternatives? What happens after I sign up? Use specific numbers, examples and dates. “We deliver excellence” gives an AI nothing to repeat; “most brand projects take six to ten weeks” does. Tables and short FAQs are especially easy to quote.

6. Earn mentions on other sites

AI tools favour businesses that others vouch for. Ask every happy customer for a review: 97% of consumers read reviews of local businesses, and 74% only look at those from the last three months. Pitch useful stories to local media and trade publications, get listed in the directories your customers use, and take part in places like LinkedIn, YouTube and Reddit, where many AI answers find their sources.

7. Complete your business profiles

For local questions, AI assistants and map apps draw on business listings. Complete and verify your Google Business Profile, Bing Places and Apple Business Connect, with the right categories, services, opening hours, photos and a description that matches your website.

8. Treat llms.txt as optional

llms.txt is a proposed plain-text file that points AI tools to a site’s most important pages. Adoption grew almost ninefold in a year, to about 36,000 sites by May 2026, according to Originality.ai. Yet Ahrefs found that around 97% of llms.txt files received no requests at all that month, and Google says the file isn’t needed for Search. It takes ten minutes to write, so it does no harm (this website has one), but it won’t replace the steps above.

9. Measure it every month

Ask the main assistants the questions your customers ask, in a private browser window, and note whether you’re mentioned and what they say about you. In Google Analytics 4, watch referrals from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com, copilot.microsoft.com and claude.ai. Clicks from AI Overviews and AI Mode are counted in the normal Search Console Performance report. For trends across many prompts, a visibility tracker helps:

Starting prices as listed by SEO.com in September 2026. Check each provider for current pricing.

None of this replaces a good product and happy customers. If you already have both, these steps make sure AI search knows about it. Our SEO and AI search service covers every step, if you’d like a hand.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

1. ChatGPT reaches 900M weekly active users, TechCrunch, 27 February 2026
2. Q2 2026 earnings call: remarks from our CEO, Google, 22 July 2026
3. Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results, Pew Research Center, 22 July 2025
4. Update: AI Overviews reduce clicks by 58%, Ahrefs, February 2026
5. We studied the impact of AI search on SEO traffic, Semrush, 21 July 2025
6. Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, BrightLocal, February 2026
7. An analysis of AI Overview brand visibility factors (75K brands studied), Ahrefs, 26 May 2025
8. Overview of OpenAI crawlers, OpenAI
9. Does Anthropic crawl data from the web?, Anthropic
10. Perplexity crawlers, Perplexity
11. Google’s common crawlers (including Google-Extended), Google Search Central
12. AI features and your website, Google Search Central, updated December 2025
13. Cloudflare will now, by default, block AI bots from crawling its clients’ websites, MIT Technology Review, 1 July 2025
14. llms.txt adoption rises 8.8x but 97% of files get zero AI requests, PPC Land, 2 July 2026
15. The best AI visibility tools, SEO.com, September 2026

Written with the assistance of AI, then reviewed and refined by the Brielgio team.