Something changed in how people find services. Instead of typing “accountant for freelancers Montréal” into Google and scanning ten blue links, a growing share of people now ask ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity a full question: “I’m a freelance designer in Montréal, who should do my taxes?” The assistant answers with two or three names.
If your business is one of those names, you receive a warmer lead than any ad could produce, because a recommendation feels different from a search result. If you are not, you were never in the running and you will never know the conversation happened. Working to be one of the names is what people call AI SEO, or GEO. I wrote a separate piece on what GEO means as a concept; this one is about what to actually do.
How assistants decide who to mention
AI assistants draw on two sources. What they learned during training, which favours businesses that have been visible and consistently described on the public web for a while. And what they find when they search the live web mid conversation, which is how most assistants now handle local and commercial questions. That second path matters enormously, because it means the assistant is reading actual pages and deciding, in the moment, which businesses the pages support mentioning. I broke that selection process down step by step in how AI assistants choose their sources.
So the question becomes: when an assistant reads your website, can it quickly and confidently extract who you are, what you do, for whom, and where?
What actually moves the needle
Be findable in normal search first. When assistants search the live web, they use search engines. If you do not appear in those results, you cannot appear in the answer. Classic SEO is not replaced by AI search, it is the pipeline that feeds it. If you are invisible on Google, start with why your site is not showing up.
State the facts in plain text. Assistants extract facts from sentences. A site that plainly says “Studio Squalli builds websites for consultants and small B2B firms, based in Montréal, working remotely” is quotable. A site that says “Elevating digital experiences” gives an assistant nothing to work with. Every page should name the service, the audience and the place in ordinary language.
Answer real questions on your site. Assistants love pages that map to questions people actually ask: what does it cost, how long does it take, do you work remotely, who do you work with. A good FAQ page is one of the most AI legible things a business site can have. Publish your prices if you possibly can; an assistant asked “how much does X cost” will favour sources that answer.
Keep your identity consistent everywhere. Your name, what you do and your location should match across your website, your Google Business Profile, directories and social profiles. Assistants cross check sources, and consistency is how a machine builds confidence that a business is real and is what it claims.
Collect reviews that describe the work. Reviews on your Google profile do double duty: they feed local rankings and they give assistants third party evidence. A review that says “rebuilt our site in three weeks and enquiries followed” is far more useful, to humans and machines alike, than five stars with no text.
Add the machine readable layer. There is a technical layer to this: information embedded in the site that describes your business, services and prices in a format machines parse directly, plus newer conventions that help AI crawlers navigate a site. You can see whether your site has this layer with Google’s own free test at search.google.com/test/rich-results; many business sites come back empty. This is the part where you likely need a builder who keeps up with it. It is standard in everything I ship. And none of it helps if a security setting is quietly turning the crawlers away at the door, which has become the default on a growing share of the web.
What does not work
Nobody can promise that ChatGPT will recommend you, and nobody can buy a placement in an assistant’s answer. Anyone selling guaranteed AI mentions is selling something they do not control. There are also no tricks here: assistants synthesize from many sources, so stuffing a page with “best plumber best plumber” does nothing. The only durable strategy is being genuinely well documented: clear site, consistent identity, real reviews, real answers.
Why the timing favours small businesses
Here is the part I find genuinely exciting. Large companies dominate traditional search because domain strength and content budgets compound over decades. AI recommendations reset some of that. An assistant answering “who should redo my website in Montréal” is not ranking domains by authority; it is looking for businesses whose fit with the question it can verify. A small firm with a clear, well structured, honest website can absolutely be the answer. Most local competitors have not even started thinking about this, which is exactly why now is the time to.
This is a core part of what I build into every site at Studio Squalli. If you want to know how visible your business currently is to AI assistants, the free audit covers it alongside Google visibility and speed.