Your competitor shows up on ChatGPT. You don't.

A small business owner posted this on Reddit a couple weeks back:

your business doesn't show up on ChatGPT or Perplexity

Another owner, a few subreddits over:

we have noticed more and more and people trying to use ChatGPT, Gemini and Grok for finding answers. Most of the time our competitors are showing up here but not us

This is a new layer of the same problem. Customers used to type their question into Google and click a link. Now some of them ask ChatGPT, get a single recommendation back, and call that business. If the recommendation isn't yours, you don't even know the search happened.

It's the same arc as owners who used to bid on keywords for Google Search Ads and watched the cost-per-lead climb while the lead quality dropped. The traffic shape changed underneath them. AI Overviews started absorbing the top of the search results page. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini pulled more of the early-stage research before anyone clicked anywhere.

Good news. The fix is the same boring stuff that has always worked. The trick is doing the steps in the right order. Most of what gets written about AI search puts schema markup at the top. In practice, schema is the third thing to fix, not the first.

Four things to fix, in order

None of these are quick wins. They all compound. Pick one for this week.

1. Make sure AI tools can read your site at all

This is the one most owners skip and the one that decides whether anything else matters. Two checks.

Is your site indexed by Google? Type site:yourdomain.com into Google's search box. If you see your pages, you're indexed. If you see nothing, Google can't show you anywhere, AI Overviews included. Fix that first (usually a sitemap submission in Google Search Console).

Does your robots.txt let AI crawlers in? OpenAI's OAI-SearchBot (the one that pulls answers for ChatGPT search) and Perplexity's PerplexityBot both follow your robots.txt file, which is a plain-text rules file at yourdomain.com/robots.txt. If a previous developer blocked them, or set a blanket "disallow" rule that catches them, you're invisible to those tools regardless of how good your content is. Most sites are fine here, but it's a five-minute check that saves a lot of work downstream. Visit that URL and look for any line that names those bots.

2. Lock in your Google Business Profile basics

This is the GBP work that actually matters, and most of it is one-time, not weekly. Google's own documentation names these as the things that help you show up in local search.

• Pick the exact primary category. "Plumber" not "Contractor." "Italian restaurant" not "Restaurant." Specific beats general.
• Fill in everything. Address, phone, business hours including holiday and special hours, services, attributes. Empty fields hurt.
• Get reviews, and reply to them. Both the count and the recency matter. Ask every happy customer with a follow-up email that includes your review link.
• Real photos of real work. Not stock images. Not a logo from 2017. Photos of jobs you actually did, captioned with a sentence about the work.

Weekly GBP posts are a nice signal of an active business, and we still recommend them, but they aren't a documented ranking factor. The categories, hours, reviews, and photos are. Get those locked in before you worry about posting cadence.

3. Add LocalBusiness schema to your site

Schema markup is structured data: a machine-readable block on each page that names your business, address, phone, hours, and what you do. It doesn't replace the words on your page. It supplements them.

Most platforms support it, with caveats. WordPress has plugins (Yoast SEO, Rank Math) that handle it for you. Wix has a structured-data section on its Business plans. Squarespace auto-generates basic LocalBusiness schema when you fill in the right fields, but it doesn't let you edit the output much. If your site is custom, drop a JSON-LD block in the page head with your real details.

To check what schema your site is putting out, paste a page URL into the Schema Markup Validator at validator.schema.org. To see whether Google can render any rich results from your structured data, use Google's Rich Results Test. They're different tools that answer different questions, both free.

Schema isn't a magic bullet. AI tools don't document it as a citation trigger. But it's a clean way to give machines the structured details about your business they'd otherwise have to guess at, and it pairs well with the GBP work above.

4. Write pages that actually answer customer questions

Not the polished version. The actual ones customers ask on the phone, in your DMs, at the counter, before they hire you. Write them out plainly, with plain answers.

A page that directly answers "who does HVAC repair in Asheville" with "We do HVAC repair in Asheville. Here's how a service call works, here's what we charge for diagnosis, here's the typical response time" gives an AI something specific to cite. A brochure-style "About our team" page gives it nothing. From what we've seen, AI tools and AI Overviews lean toward pages that answer the question directly over pages that talk around it.

You can mark these up with FAQPage schema if you want. It doesn't hurt. But Google removed the FAQ rich-result display for most sites in 2023, so don't expect a fancy search-result expansion out of it. The real win is the page itself, written in plain English, answering the question your customer typed.

Where to start this week

If you can only do one of these, do the first one. The indexing and robots.txt check is a five-minute visit to two URLs, and if anything's off, everything else on this list is wasted effort.

Then lock in the GBP basics. Then the schema. Then the FAQ-shaped pages.

The owners showing up in ChatGPT results aren't the ones with the slickest websites. Their sites can be read by AI crawlers. Their Google Business Profile is filled in. They have a page that answers the question instead of decorating around it. By the time AI search is more than a curiosity for your customers, you'll be one of them.

If you want a second set of eyes on what your site is currently giving AI search tools to work with, our free website audit covers indexing, crawler access, schema, and the GBP coverage that goes with it. Loom video plus a short written report. Or if you've already noticed traffic dropping in the last few months, the traffic-dropped playbook covers what to triage first in Search Console.

Will Mitchell
Building Blue Holler Studios in Weaverville, NC