A buyer comparing suppliers may now read an AI-written answer before, or instead of, a list of links. Several companies are selling “AI visibility” as a new discipline. Most of what helps is older and plainer: pages that can be crawled, that answer the buyer’s real questions, and that agree with each other.
Each AI search product works differently, and none of them publishes how it picks sources. So it’s worth separating what each one documents from what people speculate.
What each platform documents
Google AI Overviews and AI Mode. Google’s guidance on AI features says a page must be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet in Search. It also says there are no additional technical requirements, no special optimisations, and no need for new machine-readable files, AI text files or markup. Meeting the requirements doesn’t guarantee inclusion. Traffic from these features appears in Search Console’s Performance report under the Web search type.
ChatGPT search. OpenAI’s crawler documentation says sites that block OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt won’t appear in ChatGPT search answers. That’s separate from GPTBot, which relates to model training. You can allow one and block the other.
Perplexity. Its crawler page says PerplexityBot is used to surface and link websites in Perplexity’s search results, and is not used to crawl content for training foundation models.
Microsoft Copilot and Bing. Bing Webmaster Tools added an AI Performance report, launched as a public preview in February 2026, that shows how often your pages are cited in Copilot and Bing’s AI summaries. Microsoft notes that the counts don’t show ranking, authority or a page’s role within an answer. Its suggestions are ordinary ones: clear headings, claims supported with examples and sources, current content, IndexNow to notify Bing of changes, and Bing Places for local business details.
Check that you haven’t locked yourself out
This is a quick check, and it catches a real problem. Open yoursite.com/robots.txt and see what’s blocked. Some site templates, plugins and CDN settings can block “AI bots” in bulk, which can include the crawlers that power search features, not only training crawlers. Decide deliberately which you allow.
Then check in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools that your important pages are indexed. A page that isn’t indexed can’t be a source in either company’s AI answers.
Give the buyer a useful answer
Take one important service page and read it against the questions people have before they enquire:
- Who is this for? Name the problem and the conditions that make your service a good fit.
- What will the buyer receive? Deliverables, responsibilities and boundaries. Keep a capability you offer separate from a project you’ve completed.
- What changes the scope? Dependencies such as data quality, integrations, approvals or content. If you can’t give a credible price, say what you need in order to estimate one.
- What evidence can you show? Approved examples, a clearly labelled demonstration, or a worked explanation. Never present a concept as a client result.
- What happens next? One relevant way to ask a question or start.
For example, a warehouse software page could explain how stock adjustments are approved and recorded, then show a labelled sample workflow. That helps a buyer far more than a paragraph promising to “transform operations”, and it’s the kind of specific, checkable content any system summarising your page has to work with.
Keep the technical claims modest
Make sure important content is in the page as text, not only in images or behind tabs that need scripts to load. Link related pages to each other. Keep business details identical across the site and your business listings. If you use structured data, it should describe what visitors can actually see on the page. Markup is not proof of expertise, and no file or tag guarantees that an AI answer will cite you.
Read the page on a phone too. A correct explanation that’s hard to read still costs you the buyer.
Measure carefully
Keep a dated log of substantive page changes. Where you have access, compare Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools data with qualified enquiries over a meaningful period, and account for anything else you changed at the same time.
If you check AI answers by hand, record the exact query, the date and the platform, and treat each check as one observation. AI answers can change between sessions and over time, so one screenshot isn’t a measure of visibility.
This builds on the basics in local SEO and SEO or paid ads. Our SEO and search visibility work starts from these page-level questions. If your site leaves buyers guessing, tell us which service you need to explain and we’ll suggest a sensible first change.