There is no separate trick for AI search. Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode pick their sources from Google's normal search index, and Google says there are "no additional requirements" to appear in them. ChatGPT and Perplexity send their own search crawlers, which your site has to let in. After that, the same things decide whether you get mentioned: a page that answers the question better than others, with facts a machine can lift and check, from a business whose name, address and details match everywhere they appear. A small business does best with a few specific pages and an accurate Google Business Profile, not with new files or "AI SEO" packages.

What Google says

In May 2026 Google published a guide to its generative AI search features. Its main message is that optimising for AI search "is still SEO". To be shown at all, a page "must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet". Google's page on AI features is just as direct: "There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary."

The guide also lists what you can skip:

New machine-readable files, "AI text files", special markup or Markdown copies of your pages. You don't need them.
Structured data, as a requirement. It "isn't required for generative AI search", though markup that matches your visible text still helps Google understand the page.
Chopping pages into small pieces or rewriting them "for AI". The guide warns against both.
Buying or arranging "inauthentic mentions" of your business elsewhere.

What it asks for instead is content that isn't a commodity: something the reader can't get from ten other pages that say the same thing.

One change worth knowing: FAQ rich results, the expandable questions under a search result, are gone. Google's changelog says the feature stopped appearing in Google Search from 7 May 2026. An FAQ section can still help your readers; it no longer earns extra space in the results.

ChatGPT and Perplexity have their own crawlers

Outside Google, the assistants that search the web run their own crawlers, and each one separates "use my pages in search answers" from "train your models on my pages".

Crawler	What it does	If you block it
OAI-SearchBot (OpenAI)	Finds pages for ChatGPT's search features	Your site "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers", except as a navigational link
GPTBot (OpenAI)	Collects content for training	No effect on ChatGPT search
PerplexityBot	Finds and links pages in Perplexity's answers; not used for training	Perplexity can't cite you
Googlebot	Google Search, including AI Overviews and AI Mode	You disappear from Google altogether

These are separate switches in your robots.txt. A site can refuse training and still allow search, which is what most businesses want. Check yours: a security plugin or a hosting default that blocks "AI bots" wholesale may be keeping you out of ChatGPT's answers without anyone having decided that. OpenAI notes a change to robots.txt can take about a day to apply.

What makes a page worth citing

AI answers quote passages, not whole pages. A passage gets picked when it answers one question on its own, with something specific in it. Some evidence on what that means:

Facts with a source. In the GEO study (Princeton and others, KDD 2024), adding citations of sources, quotations and statistics to a page raised its visibility in generated answers by 30–40% overall, and keyword stuffing did not help. The tests ran mostly on a simulated engine, with one live test on Perplexity, so treat the numbers as a direction, not a promise.
The answer first. Put the direct answer in the first two or three sentences, then the detail. A reader who only sees the opening, human or machine, should still get it right.
Real dates. A visible "updated" date that changes when the content changes. An Ahrefs analysis of millions of citations found AI assistants cite noticeably fresher pages than ordinary search results. Changing the date without changing the page fools nobody for long.
Specific to you. Your prices, your area, your process, the questions your customers actually ask. Generic text about "the importance of a website" exists a thousand times already; an engine has no reason to pick yours.
Tables and lists for comparisons and steps. They are easier to read and easier to quote correctly.

From our own site: two months after launch, the pages Google shows most are the ones answering one narrow question, such as what a Belgian company website must legally display. The general pages about our studio get far fewer impressions.

For a local business: the Business Profile matters as much as the site

When someone asks for "a plumber in Ghent" or "an accountant in Brussels who speaks Russian", the answer leans on what Google knows about local businesses, and Google's guide tells businesses to keep their Business Profile up to date. In practice:

Claim your Google Business Profile and fill it in completely: categories, opening hours, service area, languages, photos.
Use exactly the same name, address and phone number on the profile, the website and directories. Mismatches make it harder to tell that they are the same business.
Put your enterprise number and address on the website, which Belgian law requires of a company website anyway.
Reply to reviews. They are public text about your business that people, and answer engines, read.

How to see whether it works

Google counts clicks from AI Overviews and AI Mode in the normal Performance report in Search Console, under the "Web" search type, so set up Search Console if you haven't. Visitors who come from ChatGPT or Perplexity show up in your analytics as referrals from those sites, though not every click carries that information. Look at trends over months, not at single days.

Checklist

robots.txt allows Googlebot, OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot (blocking GPTBot for training is your choice and doesn't affect search).
Your main pages are indexed in Google (Search Console, URL inspection).
Each service has its own page that answers the obvious questions first: what, for whom, where, how much, how long.
Facts on the site have a source, a number or a date where it makes sense.
The Google Business Profile is complete and matches the site.
Nobody sold you an "AI file" or an "AI SEO package" as a requirement.

Why we're writing about this

We build websites and web apps for Belgian businesses, and we run Navidu, a website subscription for local businesses that includes looking after the Google Business Profile. We see the same pattern on most sites we're asked to look at: the problem is rarely a missing AI trick and usually a site that answers no specific question, or a crawler that was blocked by accident. Both are quick to check. Send us your address and we'll tell you what we see.