How Do You Rank in AI Search Results?
To rank in AI search results, a business needs to be cited as a source when tools such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews answer a question, not just ranked on a results page fewer people ever scroll through.
That means answering the question immediately in the text, building genuine brand mentions beyond the business's own website, staying visible in traditional Google rankings, and making sure AI crawlers can actually read the pages. [1, 2]
Below is what determines whether a business gets included in that answer, how to check whether it's affecting you yet, and what to do about it.
What Is AI Search, and Why Doesn't Ranking on Google Guarantee Traffic Anymore?
AI search reads across many sources, works out an answer, and gives it to the user directly instead of a list of links to click through. A page can rank first on Google and still get skipped entirely if the AI system answers the question in its own summary. [1]
Traditional search shows a page of results and lets the searcher choose. AI search removes that step. Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI Overview a question and it reads dozens of pages, works out the answer, and shows two or three sources credited underneath.
This distinction has a name, answer engine optimisation, or AEO. It sits alongside traditional SEO rather than replacing it.
How Do You Check If AI Search Is Actually Affecting Your Traffic?
Compare Google Search Console impressions against clicks over six months, including its Generative AI performance report if it's available on your property, then test your own business directly in ChatGPT and Perplexity using real customer questions. If impressions hold steady while clicks fall, and your business doesn't appear in the AI answers, AI search is affecting you.
Open Google Search Console and compare impressions to clicks over the last six months.
Flag any page where impressions are flat or rising while clicks are falling.
Ask ChatGPT and Perplexity three or four questions a real customer would ask, not your business name.
Repeat with slightly different phrasing to check for a consistent pattern rather than a single miss.
A trade business in Oxfordshire might rank comfortably for "boiler installation Oxford" and still be invisible when someone asks ChatGPT "who's a reliable heating engineer near Oxford", because that's a different question drawing on a different set of sources. Checking both tells you more than checking either alone.
What Determines Whether an AI System Cites Your Content?
Six factors determine AI citations: answering the question immediately, existing Google rankings, brand mentions beyond your own site, clean content structure, crawler access, and content freshness. Existing Google rankings and brand mentions carry the most weight of the six. [1]
Answer first. State the direct answer in the first two sentences beneath each heading, then explain it. AI systems pull the clearest relevant chunk of text they can find, not the best-written paragraph on the page.
Existing Google rankings. Around half of Google's AI Overview citations come from pages already sitting in the organic top ten. [1]
Brand mentions. Being named in forum threads, trade press and review sites, even without a link attached, correlates roughly three times more strongly with AI citations than backlinks alone. [1]
Clean structure. Genuine headers that match real questions, short paragraphs, real lists, and basic schema markup (FAQ, Article, HowTo where genuinely appropriate) help AI systems parse a page correctly.
Crawler access. Check that robots.txt isn't accidentally blocking GPTBot, PerplexityBot or Google-Extended, an easy thing to get wrong on a site several developers have touched over the years.
Freshness. Pages updated recently are cited more often than pages left untouched for years. [1]
Do ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews Rank Content the Same Way?
No. Perplexity draws from the widest pool of sources, ChatGPT favours fewer but more established sources, and Google's AI Overviews lean most heavily on existing organic rankings.
| Platform | Sources per answer | What it rewards most |
|---|---|---|
| Perplexity | Widest pool, most transparent citations | Brand mentions and structured content |
| ChatGPT | Fewer sources, higher bar for authority | Consistency built up over time |
| Google AI Overviews | Drawn mainly from existing organic rankings | Traditional SEO fundamentals |
If a business can only prioritise one platform, it should be Google. The work that improves AI Overview visibility overlaps almost entirely with the SEO work most businesses should already be doing.
How Do You Track Whether AI Search Optimisation Is Working?
Google Analytics won't reliably show AI search traffic. Most of it arrives with no clear referral source, or gets folded into direct traffic, so it needs tracking manually instead.
Run the same three or four prompts through ChatGPT and Perplexity every two weeks and log whether the business appears.
Watch for unusual direct traffic spikes to specific pages that don't match a campaign or a seasonal pattern.
Treat a consistent pattern, not a single data point, as the real signal.
What Should You Do If You Don't Have an In-House Marketing Team?
Everything above can be done in-house given enough time. If that time doesn't exist alongside actually running the business, bringing in an agency to audit, fix and maintain AI search visibility is the practical alternative.
This is exactly the work Ninety8 Media already does for clients: checking where a business currently stands, fixing the structural basics that quietly hold pages back, and building the ongoing authority work that earns citations rather than getting skipped over.
If you want to know exactly where your business stands, get in touch and we'll run the check for you.
