For twenty years, "being found online" meant one thing: showing up in Google. That still matters. But now there is a second channel. More and more customers ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's own AI a question and get a ready-made answer with a few businesses named in it. If yours isn't among them, you are invisible in a channel you might not even use yourself.
The good news is that the two channels reward mostly the same things.
How the two kinds of search differ
Classic search shows a list of links. The visitor clicks, lands on your site and judges it for themselves.
AI search writes an answer. The assistant reads what it can find about businesses like yours, then names a handful. The customer may act on that answer without ever visiting your website. So the first judge of your business is now sometimes a machine.
The industry terms for this are AEO (answer engine optimisation) and GEO (generative engine optimisation). Behind the acronyms, both mean the same thing: making your business easy for these systems to find, understand and trust.
What both channels reward
A fast site that machines can read. If crawlers struggle with your site, nothing else matters. Heavy scripts, broken code and slow hosting hurt you in both places at once.
Plain, direct statements. "I build business websites for small companies across Europe. A typical project costs from €990 and launches within days of receiving the content." A sentence like that can be quoted by an AI and understood by someone skimming. Vague marketing language does badly with both.
The same facts everywhere. Name, services, location, contact details: identical on your site, your Google profile and every directory. Machines cross-check these, and contradictions make you look unreliable.
Structured data. A machine-readable label on your pages that says who you are and what you offer. Visitors never see it, but machines rely on it.
Substance over volume. One page that properly answers a question beats twenty thin pages written to fill a sitemap. Both Google and AI systems have become good at spotting filler.
What nobody can promise
Be careful with anyone who guarantees "first place in Google". That promise was always shaky, and "guaranteed visibility in ChatGPT" is worse. AI assistants don't publish their criteria, and their answers change with the phrasing, the language and the day. What proper work can do is improve your chances in a measurable way, keep an eye on how your business actually shows up, and adjust based on what you see.
If someone offers you a guaranteed AI placement, that tells you something about them, and it's not what they intended.
A sensible order of work
- Fix the foundation. A fast site whose pages plainly say what you do, where, and for roughly how much.
- Line up your facts. The same details everywhere, a complete Google Business profile, structured data on the site.
- Answer real questions properly, in the languages your customers actually speak. For European businesses this is an underrated advantage, because much of the competition still publishes in one language.
- Then watch and adjust. Check your rankings, and now and then ask the AI assistants about your own business. If they describe you wrongly, fix the source, which is your content.
Notice what's missing from that list: tricks. There is no secret handshake with any algorithm. Clarity, accuracy and speed, applied consistently, are the whole game. It's less exciting than a hack, but it lasts a lot longer.
Want your foundation checked? See how I approach search and growth, or send me a short brief and I'll tell you plainly what would make a difference for your business.