AI search and local businesses: how ChatGPT and Google find you.

By AI search I mean two things here. The first is Google's own AI: the AI Overview that sometimes appears above the search results, and AI Mode, where you can have a conversation with the search. The second is an assistant like ChatGPT, which searches the web when a question calls for it.

Both are widely available. According to Google's help pages, AI Overviews and AI Mode are available in many countries and languages, Finland and Finnish among them. ChatGPT, for its part, can search the web automatically when a question would benefit from current information.

For a business owner, this means a customer may not scroll through the search results at all. They read a ready-made answer that mentions a few businesses and call one of them. So it is worth knowing how businesses end up in that answer.

When an AI searches the web, it does not answer from memory alone. It reads pages and information the search service has already found, and builds its answer from them. That is why the same basics that bring visibility in ordinary search also count for a lot in AI search.

In its guidance for site owners, Google says plainly that there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and no special optimisation is needed. The page has to be in Google's index and eligible to be shown in Search with a snippet. There is no other technical requirement, but meeting it still does not mean the page will be shown.

The same guidance explains that when the AI puts an answer together, it may run several related searches on different sides of the question. So your site should answer several of your customers' questions, not just one: what you do, where, for whom and how the work goes.

ChatGPT works in its own way. According to OpenAI, it sometimes uses other search providers, and for local questions it may use the person's approximate location, worked out from their IP address. OpenAI also has its own search crawler, which I come to next.

The first thing is technical, and it takes a couple of minutes to check. A site can have a file called robots.txt at its root, which tells crawlers what they may read. To see yours, type your web address into your browser followed by /robots.txt.

The lines are short. If the file has the line User-agent: * with Disallow: / under it, the site is closed to every crawler that has not been given rules of its own. If there is no file and the server answers that the page was not found, Google assumes there are no crawl restrictions. If the server returns an error instead, Google stops crawling for a while.

OpenAI's guidance says that sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT's search answers. The same guidance explains that GPTBot is a different crawler: it collects material for training AI models. The settings are independent, so you can block GPTBot and still allow OAI-SearchBot.

Google's crawler is Googlebot. If it is blocked, Google cannot read the text of your page, and the page cannot be shown in Search with a snippet. That, according to Google's guidance, is a condition for appearing in its AI features.

A block can be left on, for example from when the site was being built, and you cannot see it by looking at the page. The server or a site security service can also block crawlers, so ask your provider to check that neither Googlebot nor OAI-SearchBot is blocked.

A search service can only use what the page says. If a customer asks for someone to redo a roof in Lahti, a page that says "we do roof renovations in Lahti and Hollola" is easy to connect to the question. A page with only the company name and a slogan does not say the same.

Google calls this people-first content: content made mainly for people, not to manipulate search rankings. In the same guidance, Google encourages making clear who wrote the content. That is why my name and photo are at the top of this post too.

In local search, Google also shows information from the Business Profile: opening hours, address, phone number and reviews. Checking that your Business Profile information is up to date is on the list of good practices in Google's guidance on AI features.

Check that your business name, address and phone number are the same on your website, on your Business Profile and on any other service where your business appears. Then the customer and the search service see the same information, wherever they read it.

I wrote a separate guide on setting up and verifying a profile and on reviews: Google Business Profile, how to set it up and keep it in shape.

Google says that you do not need new machine-readable files, AI text files or special markup to appear in AI Overviews. So there is no need to build a separate AI page or file for Google.

Structured data is a different matter. It describes your contact details and opening hours in the page's code in a machine-readable form, and Google's guidance says you can use it to tell Google about your opening hours, for example. It is a useful addition, but Google does not promise that the markup will show up in Search, and Google's AI search does not require it.

Nobody is promised a ranking either. OpenAI explains that ChatGPT ranks search results using several factors and that no placement is assured. In Google's local search, a better ranking cannot be requested or paid for.

The good news is that getting ready for AI search is mostly the same work as ordinary SEO. If the basics are in place, you are already well on the way.

The last item is not a measurement, because the answer varies with the person asking and where they are. It does show what kind of pages get picked for the answer, and from them you can learn what your own site is still missing.

If you do only one thing on this list, write a clear sentence at the top of your front page saying what you do and where. That one sentence serves three readers: the customer browsing on a phone, Google, and the AI putting an answer together.

Google's and OpenAI's guidance changes, so I checked every point on their own pages on the day this post is dated. The sources are below, and you can check them yourself.

If you want to see what your site would look like with all this done, I will build you a free demo of your front page. Take your time looking at it, and it does not commit you to anything.