How to Get Visible in ChatGPT and AI Search

According to Statistics Netherlands (CBS), 57 percent of Dutch adults had used a chatbot by 2025. Among 18 to 25-year-olds the figure was 90 percent, among people over 65 it was 21 percent. How many of your customers use a chatbot depends heavily on their age. AI also lives inside Google itself: AI Overviews have been available in Dutch since May 20, 2025, and AI Mode since October 8, 2025. Google says AI Mode had more than a billion monthly users worldwide in May 2026.

Take STERK Ontruimingen Dordrecht, a house clearance company. ChatGPT names it first in its answers remarkably often, and the company gained demonstrably more visibility and more leads in its region.

The short version

You get visible in ChatGPT and other AI search tools by publishing pages that answer the specific questions your customers ask, by getting other sites and customers to write about you, and by keeping your site open to the crawlers of Google, OpenAI, Microsoft and Perplexity. Google says there is no separate AI trick: what works for regular SEO works for AI answers. Check first that your pages are indexed, then write the answers your customers are looking for.

What is AI search, and how does it differ from Google?

Google gives you a list of links. AI tools like ChatGPT give you an answer straight away, often with company names or services in it and links to the sources. That answer has to come from somewhere, and the route differs per provider:

• For AI Overviews and AI Mode, Google pulls pages from its own search index. A page qualifies if it is indexed and allowed to show a snippet. Google sets no other technical requirements.
• ChatGPT finds sites through its crawler, OAI-SearchBot. According to OpenAI, a site that blocks that bot does not appear in ChatGPT search answers.
• Microsoft says Copilot runs on the Bing search index.
• Perplexity fetches pages for its search results with PerplexityBot.

If your page is not in those indexes, nobody can cite it. For the technical side, such as robots.txt and hosting, see our article on preparing your website for AI search engines.

How do you get visible in ChatGPT and AI search?

1. Write original content that answers questions

In its guide to AI features (published May 15, 2026, updated July 10, 2026), Google names original, valuable content as the biggest long-term influence on your presence in AI answers. Anyone can post a generic list of tips. Only you can explain what happened on a specific job. For a clearance company, that could be a description of what a real house clearance involves and how long it took.

Put your customers' questions in headings, for example "How does a house clearance in Dordrecht work?", with a short, factual answer directly underneath and the detail after that. Microsoft recommends question-and-answer blocks and clear headings for Copilot. Google says you do not need a special writing style for AI, so keep the text readable for people.

2. Get other people to write about you

In December 2025, Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands and compared their mentions in ChatGPT, Google's AI Mode and Google's AI Overviews against a long list of traits. The strongest link was with how often a brand is mentioned on YouTube, followed by mentions on other websites. The number of pages and the number of backlinks a site had showed a much weaker link with mentions. Ahrefs itself points out that correlation does not prove cause, and the sample only covers domains with a domain rating above 40.

For a regional business, this work happens off your own site: customer reviews, and mentions by partners and in regional media. Consider video too, since YouTube topped this study. Chasing fake mentions pays off less than it looks, according to Google.

3. Make your credibility visible (E-E-A-T)

E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust. It is a Google framework, and Google says it is not a ranking factor in itself. Google calls trust the most important part. Put the author's name on your articles and link it to a page about that person. Show customer cases and reviews, and be clear about who you are and how you work. Do not invent author profiles: Google lists fake names and AI-generated faces as a sign of a low-quality page.

4. Think local

A local focus paid off for STERK Ontruimingen, and it can for you. Name your towns, regions and service area clearly on your site. Pair that with cases, for example under a title like "How we cleared 15 homes in Dordrecht within 2 weeks." Google lists an up-to-date Google Business Profile as one way for a local business to show up in AI answers and regular search results.

5. Build topic clusters around the follow-up questions

Google explains that AI Overviews and AI Mode split one question into several related searches (query fan-out). A main page ("House clearance in Dordrecht") with supporting pages on cost, process and what happens to the furniture can catch those follow-up questions. Do not create a separate page for every variation of a question. If you do it to steer AI answers, Google treats it as scaled content abuse under its spam policy.

What the sources say you can skip

Google calls AEO and GEO, the terms for optimizing for AI answers, plain SEO. The same guide lists things you can leave alone for Google. Combined with the Ahrefs research, that gives you this:

• An llms.txt file. Google Search does not use it, so it neither helps nor hurts your visibility there. In an analysis of 137,210 websites, 97 percent of llms.txt files received no requests at all in May 2026.
• Special markup. Structured data is not required for Google's AI features, and no schema.org markup exists for them. Microsoft does say schema helps search engines and AI systems understand your content.
• Chopping content into small pieces or rewriting it just for AI.
• Publishing lots of pages. Ahrefs found almost no link between a site's page count and mentions in AI answers.
• Chasing mentions that are not real.

Which route does each AI system take to your site?

The route differs per provider, and that decides what you check. The table puts the routes from this article side by side.

What does a page look like when an AI answer uses it?

An AI system often lifts a single paragraph from a page and leaves the rest. Each paragraph therefore has to make sense on its own. Name the subject in the sentence itself: write "A house clearance in Dordrecht usually takes a few days for an average home" and avoid "This usually takes a few days." Put the answer first and the explanation after it. A reader who drops off after two sentences has already got what they came for.

A workable structure for each page has four steps:

1. Put the customer's question in a heading, in the words the customer uses.
2. Give an answer of two to four sentences directly under the heading.
3. Then work out the details: steps, conditions, an example from your own practice.
4. Close with what the reader can do next, such as a phone number or a booking form.

No idea which questions to answer? Go through the emails and phone calls from the last month. The questions customers ask you are the questions they ask ChatGPT. You can read more about writing these pages under content, and about the technical side under websites.

How do you check whether you are already mentioned?

You do not need an expensive tool to start. Open ChatGPT, Google (with AI Mode) and Perplexity and ask ten questions a customer of yours would ask, such as "which company clears out a house in Dordrecht?". For each question, note whether your company is mentioned, which competitors do appear and which sources are listed under the answer. Repeat this every month with the same questions and you will see how things develop. AI answers vary from run to run and from user to user, so read the outcome as an indication, not a ranking.

If you want this researched in a structured way and tied to a plan, we look at it under AI.

What can you do today?

• Check in Google Search Console that your most important service pages are indexed.
• Open your robots.txt and make sure OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot are not blocked.
• Register your site with Bing Webmaster Tools if you have not yet.
• Write one page on the question customers ask most, with a short answer directly under the heading.
• Update your Google Business Profile and ask two happy customers for a review.
• Ask the ten questions from the previous section and save the answers as a baseline.

What it brings in and how to measure it

AI answers reduce clicks. In March 2025, Pew Research tracked 900 American adults: on pages with an AI summary they clicked a search result in 8 percent of visits, against 15 percent without one. A link inside the summary itself got a click in 1 percent of visits. In a comparison of 300,000 keywords (December 2025), Ahrefs found that the click-through rate for the top position was about 58 percent lower on keywords with an AI Overview than you would otherwise expect. Neither study is specific to the Netherlands. Google says the clicks that do come are of higher quality, because visitors stay longer on the site.

Since 2026 you can measure this in the tools of Google and Microsoft themselves. On June 3, 2026, Google Search Console got a report for generative AI features showing impressions, pages, countries, devices and dates for AI Overviews and AI Mode. Since the end of August 2026 it has been available to all sites worldwide. Bing Webmaster Tools has shown, since February 10, 2026 (public preview), how often your pages are cited in Copilot and in summaries in Bing. Google warns that no external tool has access to its internal ranking systems. Use such tools if they help, but check their advice against what Google itself says.

Data as of October 6, 2026.

What Make it Matter does for you

At Make it Matter we build brands that rank in Google and show up in AI search too. We combine SEO/GEO (technical optimization, content strategy and link building), AI-ready content (copy and schema that AI tools pick up) and a regional focus, so your business comes first in local answers. That is how we work toward getting your business named in AI answers, as with STERK Ontruimingen.

You can find examples of our work under cases. Whether your business already has a chance of being named in AI answers is something we can find out with an AI visibility scan.

Frequently asked questions

Can I pay to be mentioned in ChatGPT?

You cannot pay for ChatGPT's regular answers. They draw on pages the search function finds. Ads are a separate format and have no bearing on the mention in the answer itself. You earn visibility in the answer with good content that can be found.

Is AI search the same as SEO?

Mostly. Google calls AEO and GEO plain SEO. You need the same foundation: an accessible site, indexed pages and useful content. What comes on top is attention to mentions elsewhere and to the crawlers of providers like OpenAI.

How soon will I see results?

There is no way to say in advance. A new page first has to be found and indexed, and then it has to be picked as a source. Expect weeks to months, and track a fixed set of questions to see whether you are making progress.

Do I need an llms.txt file?

No. Google Search does not use the file, and an Ahrefs analysis showed that almost no llms.txt file received any requests. Your time is better spent on content and on mentions on other sites.

Should I block or allow AI bots?

That depends on your goal. If you want to appear in ChatGPT's search answers, allow OAI-SearchBot. GPTBot is for training models and is handled separately. You decide per bot in your robots.txt.

Does this work for a small local business?

Yes, local questions are the easiest to answer well. State your service area, keep your Google Business Profile current, collect reviews and describe real jobs from your own region. A regional business owner does not have to compete with national sites on general questions.