Customers ask AI before they Google. Here's how your business gets found.

In BrightLocal's 2026 survey of 1,002 US consumers, 45 percent had used an AI tool for a local business recommendation in the past year. A year earlier it was 6 percent. ChatGPT led at 31 percent, Google's AI Mode was next at 23 percent, then Gemini. Among the people who use them, 63 percent trust what they're told.

Australia is behind the US but moving the same way. Telsyte's June 2026 survey found 12 percent of Australians now name an AI tool as their main way to look something up online, double the 5 percent of a year earlier, and counted 13.8 million Australian ChatGPT users.

Google itself has changed. Whitespark's study found AI Overviews appearing on about 68 percent of local business searches. A randomised field experiment by researchers at the Indian School of Business and Carnegie Mellon, run in early 2026 with over a thousand participants, found that when an AI Overview appears, clicks out to websites fall by 38 percent, and the share of searches that end without any click rises from 54 to 72 percent.

So two things are true at once. Fewer people click through to websites, and more decisions get made from the summary. Which raises the only question that matters: what is the summary made from?

None of the companies publish a ranking formula, and anyone who claims to know one is guessing. But they do publish how they crawl, and they've told researchers roughly where local facts come from.

• Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode. Google's own guide says it in one line: optimising for generative AI search "is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO." The AI answers are built from the same index as the ten blue links, plus your Google Business Profile, which Google says "can help your products and services to be visible in both AI responses and other Google Search results." There's no special file or markup. Google says it ignores llms.txt.
• ChatGPT. OpenAI runs a dedicated crawler, OAI-SearchBot, and is blunt about it: "Sites that are opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers." Its web results are widely understood to lean on Microsoft's Bing index, which makes being in Bing matter for the first time in a decade. For place details it also draws on directories; asked directly, it has named Google, Yelp, Bing and Facebook among its sources.
• Perplexity. Runs PerplexityBot "to surface and link websites in search results", recommends allowing it, and leans on reviews more heavily than the others.
• Claude. Anthropic's Claude-SearchBot indexes the web for search, and blocking it "may reduce your site's visibility and accuracy in user search results."
• Copilot. Microsoft's, so Bing.

Across all of them, Yext's analysis of 6.8 million citations from ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity found 86 percent came from sources the business itself controls: 44 percent from the business's own website and 42 percent from its listings. Forums like Reddit were about 2 percent. That's a listings vendor measuring its own clients, so treat the exact split loosely. The direction, though, matches everything else we read: the assistants are reading you, not the crowd.

A listing can tell an assistant your hours and your phone number. It can't answer "do they do emergency call-outs on a Sunday" or "can I bring the dog". The assistant goes looking for a page that says so. If you don't have one, it either guesses, or it recommends the business that does.

The website is also the thing every other source gets checked against. Mismatched hours between your site, your Business Profile and a directory is, in every study we read, a reason to be dropped from the answer. Your site is where you set the facts. The listings copy them.

And it's the only source you fully control. Reddit threads, review sites and directories all have their own agendas and their own errors. The page that says exactly what you do, where, for whom and for how much is the one you own, and it's the one 44 percent of citations point at.

In rough order of how much evidence sits behind each one.

• Get the facts straight everywhere. Name, address, phone, hours, services, service area: identical on your site, Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple Maps, Yelp and Facebook. Boring, and the single most repeated finding in every piece of research we looked at.
• Reviews, and recent ones. Every study of AI recommendations finds review volume and freshness matter, often more than where you rank on the map. One test across five assistants found businesses with 500-plus reviews got named almost twice as often as top-three businesses with under 50.
• Pages that answer real questions in plain words. The academic paper that coined "generative engine optimisation" found that adding specific figures, quotations and cited sources to a page lifted its visibility in AI answers by up to 40 percent, with the effect varying by topic. In practice: one page per service, saying what it includes, what it costs, where you go, and the questions people actually ring about, answered on the page.
• Be in Bing's index as well as Google's. ChatGPT and Copilot draw on it. Bing Webmaster Tools is free and takes ten minutes, and IndexNow tells Bing about changes the moment they happen.
• Let the search crawlers in. OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot and PerplexityBot all honour robots.txt, and all three companies say blocking them removes you from answers. Whether you also allow the training crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended) is a separate choice and doesn't affect search.
• Keep it fresh. AI answers skew hard toward recently updated pages. One analysis found 85 percent of AI Overview citations pointed at content under two years old. Updating hours, prices and a few lines each season counts.
• Structured data, done honestly. Google says it "isn't required for generative AI search" and recommends it anyway for rich results. Independent evidence that it lifts AI citations is thin. It's cheap, so we add it, but it isn't the lever.
• Be mentioned elsewhere. The local paper, the chamber of commerce, the club newsletter, a supplier's site. Real mentions. Google explicitly warns against manufactured ones.

• llms.txt. A proposed text file that lists your site for AI tools. Google says Search ignores it. No major provider has said they use it. Ahrefs found that of roughly 38,000 sites that published one, 97 percent received zero requests for it in a month. We put one on twinlakes.au because it costs nothing and might matter one day, not because it does anything today.
• "AI markup" and special formats. Google: "You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown to appear in Google Search."
• Mass-producing pages with AI. Google calls it scaled content abuse and acts on it. Assistants cite specific, first-hand pages. A hundred thin ones get you nothing.
• Anyone promising a guaranteed place in ChatGPT's answers. Google: "No third-party tool has access to our internal ranking or AI systems." The same is true of the others. One 2026 measurement found ChatGPT names about 1 percent of the businesses available for a given query. Nobody can promise a slot, and we don't.

Every Twin Lakes site ships with the things above that have evidence behind them, because they're the same things that make a site good for a person: one page per service in plain English, the questions people actually ask answered on the page, your hours and details kept in one place and synced to your listings, fast HTML any crawler can read, structured data for your business and your FAQs, a sitemap, and a robots file that welcomes the search crawlers by name. We register you with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools and push changes through IndexNow.

Then, every few months, we ask the assistants about you. "Best plumber near Budgewoi." "Does [your business] do emergency call-outs?" We look at what comes back and where it came from. If a directory has your hours wrong, that's where we fix it. If a question keeps coming up that your site doesn't answer, we add the answer.

What we don't do is promise a ranking. Nobody honest can. What we promise is that nothing about your website is the reason you're left out.

Open ChatGPT or Gemini and ask, the way a customer would, for your kind of business in your suburb. Then ask it a specific question about you. What it says is what your next customer hears. If it's wrong, or you're missing, the fix usually starts with your own website. Send us the form and we'll show you what that looks like, free, by tomorrow.