AI and Your Website: Getting Found in ChatGPT and AI Overviews

How AI search finds your business

When someone asks an AI assistant "who builds websites for plumbers?" or "how much does a website cost in the UK?", the assistant either answers from what it learned in training or, more often now, searches the web and summarises what it finds, with links. Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode work from Google's search index. ChatGPT search uses OpenAI's own crawler and other sources. In each case, your website has to be crawlable, clear and trustworthy enough to be chosen and quoted.

What Google says

Google's Search Central page "AI features and your website" (checked October 2026) says that to appear as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet, and that there are no additional technical requirements. It says you do not need special optimisations, special schema.org markup or new AI text files. Normal SEO good practice applies. It also confirms that sites appearing in these features are counted in Search Console's Performance report under the Web search type.

To limit what Google shows, the same controls as normal search apply: nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet and noindex. The separate Google-Extended token controls use of content for Gemini training and grounding in some other Google products; it does not remove you from AI features in Search.

In practice that means the work that helps you rank in normal search is the same work that helps you appear in AI answers: indexable pages, helpful content and a site Google can crawl easily.

OpenAI's crawlers

OpenAI's documentation lists three agents, each controlled separately in robots.txt:

• OAI-SearchBot surfaces websites in ChatGPT's search features. Block it and your pages will not appear in ChatGPT search answers.
• GPTBot crawls content that may be used to train OpenAI's models. Blocking it opts you out of training, not out of search.
• ChatGPT-User visits a page when a user's request needs it. OpenAI notes robots.txt rules may not apply to these user-initiated visits.

Most small businesses want to be found, so check your robots.txt and any firewall or bot-blocking settings are not shutting out the search crawlers by accident.

What makes a page easy to quote

• A direct answer near the top. One or two sentences that answer the question in plain words, naming your business and a price where relevant.
• Specific facts. Prices, areas covered, timescales, standards, opening hours. Vague marketing copy gives an AI nothing to cite.
• Clear structure. Descriptive headings, short paragraphs, lists and tables.
• FAQs written as real questions with complete answers.
• Consistent details across your site, Google Business Profile and directories: name, address, phone.
• Schema markup that matches the visible page, such as LocalBusiness, Service and FAQPage. Google says it is not required for AI features, but it helps search engines understand the page.
• Fast, crawlable HTML. Content that only appears after heavy JavaScript runs is harder for every crawler.

See which pages you need and why a site is not on Google.

Using AI to build or write your website

AI tools can help draft copy, but unedited AI text tends to be generic, and generic pages are exactly what AI search has no reason to cite. Use it for first drafts, then add what only you know: your prices, your process, real examples, local detail. Check every fact. And be careful with AI chatbots on your own site: they must give accurate information about your services and handle personal data in line with UK GDPR.

When to call us

Our Business package, from £500 + VAT, includes a page per service written to rank, full schema markup and a fast build, which is the groundwork both search engines and AI assistants rely on. If you want an existing site checked for crawler access and structure, we do that at £45 an hour + VAT. Get in touch or call 01623 650333.

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