The question: "Are we showing up when people search on ChatGPT? How do we get showing up more?"
Four different people. Four different industries. Same question, same week.
Every few years, someone declares SEO dead. It was dead when Google launched Panda. Dead again when mobile-first indexing came in. Dead when voice search was going to take over everything. And yet, here we are, still talking about keywords and content and why your competitor ranks above you.
To be fair, organic search is harder than it used to be. Even when you rank number one, paid ads sit above you. Then the Maps pack. Then product listings. You can do everything right and still be the fourth thing a user sees on the page. And now it's not just Google. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, and others are all answering questions your potential customers are typing right now.
If you want to be at the very top, Google Ads is still the most reliable way to get there. Paid sits above everything. Always has.
After that, your Google Business Profile is worth more attention than most people give it. The Maps pack sits above most organic results and is often easier to compete in than traditional rankings. Get your GBP fully optimised, keep it updated, and collect reviews consistently. That's your second priority.
Then, once those two are working, you build your organic SEO and start thinking about AI visibility. It's the right order. Each layer compounds the one before it.
And now it's not just Google. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, and others are all answering questions your potential customers are typing right now.
So the concern isn't irrational. The panic, though, is probably premature.
What's Actually Happening
In Australia, Google's AI Overviews now appear in around 39% of searches, according to a 2026 study by NetStripes, nearly triple the global average. Australia rolled out AI Overviews in October 2024 and has been one of the fastest-adopting markets globally.
What this means practically: when someone searches for a plumber on the Sunshine Coast, or a bookkeeper in Brisbane, there's a real chance Google is generating an AI summary at the top of the page before any traditional results appear. And increasingly,those AI summaries include paid ads too. What started as an organic content experiment now sits alongside Google's advertising product.
ChatGPT and other AI tools are also fielding questions directly, without going through Google at all. Someone asks "who's a good electrician in Noosa?" and the AI answers based on whatever information it can find about local businesses online.
This is the shift the four business owners were worried about. And it's a real shift.
But here's the thing that most of the breathless commentary misses.
AI Is Just a Better Search Engine
Think about what any AI platform is actually doing when it answers a question. It's reading the web, assessing which sources are credible, well-structured, and relevant, and pulling from those. It's search, just faster and more conversational.
Which means thebusinesses showing up in AI answers are mostly the same businesses that were already showing up in Google. This isn't a guess. Research across 300,000+ keywords found that 76% of URLs cited in AI Overviews also ranked in the top 10 of Google search results at the time of the study. The relationship between traditional rankings and AI citations is strong, though the exact figures shift as AI platforms update how they source content. The rankings you've been building still matter.
AI isn't a new game. It's the same game, played on a slightly bigger board.
The businesses that will struggle with AI search are the same ones already struggling with SEO: no clear site structure, thin content, pages that haven't been updated since 2019, and no real signal of authority.
If your fundamentals are solid, you're already most of the way there.
What the Checklist Actually Looks Like
Solid site structure. One page per service, logical navigation, clean internal links. AI reads your site the same way Google does. It follows links and builds a picture of what you cover. A confusing, poorly organised site is a signal to both Google and AI that you're not a credible source. A well-structured website is the foundation everything else sits on.
Relevant, well-written content. Answer the questions your customers are actually asking. Use proper headings (H1, H2, H3) that describe what each section covers. AI pulls from content that's easy to parse, and that means clear subheadings, short paragraphs, and direct answers early in each section.
FAQ sections with FAQ schema. The FAQPage schema is currently one of the highest-impact markups for getting cited by AI platforms. Write genuine questions that your customers ask. Answer them clearly. Add the schema. This very article has one below. So should your service pages. Your SEO partner can implement this correctly.
Schema markup more broadly. Organisation schema, Article schema, local business markup. This is how you speak the language of both search engines and AI. It removes ambiguity about who you are, where you are, and what you do.
A clean, fast website without heavy JavaScript. Page speed matters, but there's an additional consideration here. AI crawlers, like many search engine crawlers, don't read heavy JavaScript well. If your site relies on JavaScript to load content, there's a real chance that the content is invisible to AI. Build sites in clean HTML where possible. What loads quickly and clearly for a human also loads clearly for an AI.
Consistent, quality content output. One solid blog post per month that genuinely answers a question your customers are asking. This builds topical authority over time and gives AI more material to pull from. Copywriting and content aren't optional if you want long-term visibility.
llms.txt (probably worth adding, but no guarantees). This is a newer file format, similar to robots.txt, placed in your website's root directory. It gives AI crawlers a structured plain-text summary of your site, your services, and your key pages. Whether it sticks around as a standard or fades out is unclear at this point. But right now, adding it costs nothing and signals you're paying attention. Ask your developer to add it.
Where AI Search Is Heading
My view: AI systems are getting smarter, and they're moving toward browsing the web the way a human would, just faster and more efficiently. They\'ll follow navigation, read pages, assess quality, and form a view of whether a business is credible.
Good navigation structure is already a competitive advantage. If a person can walk through your site and quickly understand what you do, where you operate, and why you're trustworthy, an AI can too. If your site is confusing to a human visitor, it'll be confusing to an AI.
Don't try to game it. Google has always been smarter than the shortcuts people attempt, and AI is only getting better at detecting them. Build real authority, publish consistent content, and don't take shortcuts. That's what has always worked. It still works now.
One New Thing Worth Tracking: AI Visibility
Traditional SEO metrics don't tell you whether your brand is showing up in AI-generated answers. Rankings and traffic are still important, but they don't capture the full picture anymore.
Semrush recently launched an AI Visibility metric, a score from 0-100 that measures how often your brand appears in AI-generated responses compared to competitors. It tracks mentions across AI platforms, estimated audience reach, and which topics you're being cited for versus which ones your competitors are winning.
If you want to understand specifically how you're performing in AI search, this is the metric to start tracking. It's a genuinely new measurement for a genuinely new behaviour.
The Short Version
When a business owner asks "how do we show up in ChatGPT?", the honest answer is: build the kind of website and content that a credible, well-established business would have, and you're already most of the way there.
Solid structure. Relevant service pages. FAQ schema. Clean code without heavy JavaScript. Fast hosting. Consistent content. A good internal linking structure that makes it easy to navigate.
Everything else is mostly noise.
If you want to know specifically where your site stands, across both traditional SEO and AI visibility, let's take a look.
If the same question came up four times in one week, it's probably worth writing a blog post. Which is exactly what happened here.
If you want to know how your site is actually set up for AI and traditional search, we're happy to take a look. cloudclicks® has been at this for 15 years and has generated over $120 million in sales for clients. We'll give you a straight answer.