A growing number of people no longer search and scan ten blue links. They ask an assistant — ChatGPT, Google's AI overviews, Perplexity, Copilot — and act on the two or three businesses it names.
If your business is not one of those, you never enter the conversation. The good news is that the work overlaps heavily with ordinary SEO. The emphasis is just different.
Be specific, because vagueness cannot be quoted
Assistants extract concrete facts. "We serve Livingston, Onalaska, Goodrich and Cleveland, Texas, and typically install within two weeks" is quotable. "We pride ourselves on quality service throughout the region" is not, and gets skipped in favour of a competitor who said something checkable.
If a sentence could appear on any competitor's website unchanged, it is doing nothing for you.
Structured data is doing the heavy lifting
Schema markup describes your business in a machine-readable format: what type of business, where, the phone number, the services, the opening hours, the questions you answer. Assistants rely on it because it removes guesswork.
The ones that matter most for a small business are LocalBusiness, Service and FAQPage. If your site has none of them today, that is the highest-value thing you can add.
Answer real questions, in the words people use
Assistants are asked questions, so pages structured as answers do well. Take the questions you get asked constantly on the phone — how much does it cost, how long does it take, do you cover my area, what happens if it rains — and answer each plainly under a heading that matches the question.
Let the crawlers in
AI crawlers respect robots.txt. If yours blocks them, whether deliberately or because someone copied a config years ago, you are invisible to them no matter how good the content is. Check what your file actually says.
There is a real decision here: some of these crawlers also gather training data. For most small businesses wanting more customers, the visibility is worth far more than the content is, but it is your call to make deliberately rather than by accident.
Consistency across the web
An assistant is more confident recommending a business whose details match everywhere it looks. Same name, same address, same phone number on your site, your Google profile, and every directory listing you have ever created.
What has not changed
Fast, well-structured, genuinely useful pages still win. AI has not replaced that — it has raised the reward for being clear and specific, and lowered the value of padding. Which, for a small business with real things to say, is good news.