Answers

The questions business owners ask about AI search

Every answer here is written the way we build them for clients: the answer first, the reasoning after it, no padding in between, and the awkward questions included rather than skipped. Where a page quotes a number, that number comes from our own audit database and links back to the study it came from.

Start here

Find out whether you have a problem and which one it is.

Why isn't my business showing up in AI answers?
Five reasons a real business goes unnamed by ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity, and how to tell which one is yours.
How do I get my business to show up in ChatGPT?
What actually has to be true before an AI assistant will name your business in an answer.
How long before my business shows up in AI answers?
Honest timelines: what moves in weeks, what takes months, and what never moves at all.
How any of this works

The mechanism underneath, in plain terms, with the jargon translated.

What is answer engine optimization?
The plain definition, what it covers, and where it stops being different from good publishing.
How does AI visibility actually work?
The six pillars that decide whether an assistant names your business, and why doing five of them well is not most of the result.
AEO vs SEO vs GEO: what is actually different?
Three acronyms, one real distinction, and two of them mean the same thing.
How do AI citations work?
How an assistant picks the few sources it credits, and why the count differs so much between engines.
Before you hire anyone

The questions worth asking a vendor, including us, before money changes hands.

What happens to your content system when you fire the agency?
Most AI content services rent you the system. What you keep on the way out is the question nobody asks until it is too late.
AI search keeps changing. Who is tracking it for you?
The rules moved more than once this year and nothing warns you when your setup stops working.
Doing the work

What the job actually involves once you have decided to do it.

Does schema markup still matter for AI search?
What structured data does, what it cannot do, and the mistake almost every site makes.
How much of my time does this actually take?
The real reason content programmes die is founder time. What the job needs from you, and what it should not.
The measurement behind these

Where the numbers come from

The figures quoted across these pages come from our own audit database rather than from industry reports: 4,291 AI answers collected across four engines between 28 April and 10 August 2026, and 60 businesses across 41 niches tested between 3 June and 14 August 2026. We publish the sample sizes, the date ranges and the limitations, including the measures we decided were not trustworthy enough to publish.

Read the AI visibility studySee it working in 3 real businesses
If this is your category

Find out where you actually show up

The free scan runs your business against ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity and shows you which buyer questions you appear in and which ones a competitor owns.

Run the free scanBook a strategy call