For twenty years, getting found online meant one thing: ranking on Google. That hasn’t gone away — but it’s no longer the whole story. A growing number of your potential customers now open ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google’s own AI overview and simply ask a question: “Who should I use for this, near me?”

And the AI answers. It names a handful of businesses. If yours isn’t one of them, you were never in the running — and you’ll never even see the enquiry you lost. This is AI search visibility, and it’s quietly becoming one of the most important things a local business can invest in.

What’s actually changed about search

Traditional SEO is about earning a position on a page of blue links. The customer still does the work: they scan the results, click a few, compare, and decide. AI search collapses that. The assistant reads the web for them and hands back a short, confident recommendation — often just two or three names.

That shift matters for one simple reason: there’s no page two in an AI answer. Ranking fourth on Google still gets you clicks. Being the fourth-best-known business to an AI gets you nothing, because it stops at three. The competition for visibility just got a lot tighter.

How AI assistants decide who to name

The exact mechanics differ between tools, but they draw on broadly the same signals. Understanding them is how you influence them:

• Your wider web presence. AI models are trained and grounded on what the web says about you — your site, directories, reviews, press and mentions. The more consistent and substantial that footprint, the more confidently you’re recommended.
• Reviews and reputation. Volume, recency and sentiment of reviews are a powerful trust signal. A business with 80 recent, positive Google reviews is an easy thing for an AI to recommend.
• Clear, structured information. Assistants favour businesses whose services, location and specialisms are stated plainly and marked up properly, so there’s no ambiguity about what you do and who you serve.
• Traditional authority. The same backlinks and rankings that help on Google also tell an AI you’re a credible source worth citing.

Notice the overlap with good SEO. AI visibility isn’t a separate discipline you bolt on — it’s what happens when the foundations are strong and legible to a machine.

Five practical steps to get named

Here’s where to start, in roughly the order we’d tackle it for a client.

1. Make your offer unmistakably clear

If a human can’t tell within five seconds exactly what you do, where, and for whom, an AI can’t either. State it plainly on your homepage and key pages: the service, the location, the type of customer. Vague, clever copy is the enemy of being recommended.

2. Build a consistent presence beyond your website

Your site is one source. AI cross-references many. Make sure your name, address and core details are identical everywhere they appear — Google Business Profile, directories, industry listings, social profiles. Inconsistency creates doubt, and doubt keeps you off the shortlist.

3. Earn reviews, deliberately and continually

A steady flow of genuine reviews is one of the highest-leverage things you can do — for the map pack, for trust, and now for AI. Build a simple, repeatable way to ask happy customers at the right moment, and never let the stream dry up.

4. Add structured data and answer real questions

Mark up your business, services and FAQs with schema so machines read them without guessing. Then publish content that answers the actual questions buyers ask — the kind of clear, useful page an AI is happy to quote. Our SEO & AI visibility service is built around exactly this.

5. Check what the AI currently says about you

This is the step almost nobody does. Open ChatGPT and Perplexity and ask the questions your customers would ask. See who gets named, see what’s said about you (if anything), and use the gaps as your to-do list. Track it monthly — it’s the AI-era equivalent of a rank check.

The bottom line

You don’t need to panic, and you don’t need a separate “AI strategy” sold to you with a lot of buzzwords. The businesses winning in AI search are, overwhelmingly, the ones already doing the fundamentals well: a clear website, a strong reputation, consistent listings and genuinely useful content.

Get those right and you don’t just rank on Google — you become the answer when someone asks. That’s the whole game now: not just being findable, but being the business the machine recommends by name.

Peter Claridge

Founder, Riverforge

Peter has spent two decades helping companies grow. He now applies the same systematic commercial thinking to professional service firms across Reading and beyond.