Findy AI

Guide · 12 min read

How to optimise your website for ChatGPT and Perplexity.

A growing share of customers now ask an AI assistant for local recommendations before they ever touch a search engine. This is the practical playbook for showing up in those answers. No jargon, no fluff, no promises we can't back.

The short version

  • AI search is different from Google, but it isn't magic. It rewards clarity, citations, and question-shaped content.
  • Three things move the needle: let the crawlers in, write the way customers actually ask, and get talked about somewhere other than your own site.
  • You can't improve a system you don't measure. Test your own Golden Queries in ChatGPT and Perplexity monthly and track what changes.

Why AI search is worth your time.

Before the tactics, a plain-English take on what's actually changed and what hasn't.

Tools like Peec.ai measure brand performance in AI search across three things: Visibility (are you named?), Position (how prominently?), and Sentiment (described well or badly?). Those are the right questions. Funny enough, they're also the questions Google dodged for two decades - AI assistants just answer them out loud.

At the same time, agencies who've done this since the early 2000s will tell you most "AI SEO" advice is regular SEO with a new coat of paint: readable pages, clear entities, real reputation. That's mostly right too.

The honest position sits in between. LLMs don't crawl like Googlebot, don't rank on the same signals, and cite third-party sources far more heavily than brand websites. But the fundamentals (be readable, be useful, be trustworthy) still do the heavy lifting.

Let the AI crawlers in.

You can't be recommended by a system that can't read your site.

The most common failure we see is a site accidentally blocking the exact bots it wants to attract. Check your robots.txt for these user-agents and make sure none are disallowed:

  • GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot — OpenAI / ChatGPT
  • PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User — Perplexity
  • Google-Extended — Google's Gemini and AI Overviews training
  • ClaudeBot — Anthropic's Claude
  • Applebot-Extended — Apple Intelligence

A permissive default (User-agent: * / Allow: /) is fine. A blanket Disallow: / or an over-eager Cloudflare bot rule is not. One more thing worth checking: your site should return real HTML on first load. If everything hydrates client-side and view-source is empty, most AI crawlers see nothing - they don't run JavaScript the way browsers do.

While you're in there, add a Sitemap: line pointing at your sitemap. On llms.txt: it gets a lot of airtime but there's no solid evidence any major assistant actually uses it yet. We publish one on this site anyway because it costs nothing to maintain - just don't expect it to move anything, and don't let anyone sell it to you as a ranking lever.

Write the way customers ask.

LLMs pattern-match on the phrasing of real questions, not marketing copy.

Open ChatGPT and type the way a customer would: "best emergency plumber in Sheffield open on Sundays", not "premium plumbing solutions". Your pages should read the same way. Concretely:

  • Lead every service page with a one-sentence answer to the obvious question. Not a slogan, not a hero image. The answer.
  • Use headings that are the questions: "How much does it cost?", "Do you serve my area?", "How quickly can you come out?". Follow each with a plain answer in the first two lines.
  • Name yourself, your location, and your service clearly and often. "We are Findy Plumbing, based in Sheffield, serving South Yorkshire." LLMs stitch entities from repetition, and ambiguity gets you dropped.
  • Add a proper FAQ block with real questions and honest answers. Mark it up with FAQPage schema so search engines and AI crawlers can parse it.

The pattern across every site that wins in AI answers: they answer the exact question in the first line and get out of the way. That's it. That's the trick.

Get talked about somewhere other than your own site.

AI answers are built out of citations. You need to be one of them.

When ChatGPT or Perplexity recommend a local business, they overwhelmingly cite directories, review sites, forums, local press, and "best of" round-ups. Not your homepage. If those sources don't mention you, you basically don't exist in the answer.

  • Get the boring citations right first. Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, and the top two or three directories in your category. Same name, same address, same phone number everywhere. Inconsistency is the fastest way to get dropped.
  • Earn reviews on platforms customers actually read. Google reviews are table stakes. Category-specific sites (Trustpilot, Checkatrade, Yell, TripAdvisor, Bark) move the needle more than most owners expect, because that's where the assistants pull social proof.
  • Show up in comparison content. A single "best [service] in [town]" article that mentions you can outrank a year of on-site work. Pitch local journalists, sponsor a niche newsletter, contribute a genuinely useful quote to a round-up. Public relations dressed as SEO, and it works.
  • Answer publicly. A well-written Reddit or forum answer, posted once, keeps earning citations for years. Recommendation engines lean heavily on community sources.

Measure like you mean it.

You cannot improve what you don't watch.

Pick five to ten Golden Queries - the exact phrases a customer would type into ChatGPT or Perplexity to find a business like yours. Run them once a month. Record three things for each:

  • Are you named at all?
  • If yes, in what position, and are you described correctly?
  • Which competitors are named, and which sources are cited?

This is the same model the enterprise measurement platforms have productised: Visibility, Position, Sentiment. You don't need their dashboards for the basic version. A spreadsheet and a monthly reminder will do. Our audit checklist has the exact fields to record.

Watch the citation list, not just the mentions. If Perplexity keeps citing a directory you're not listed on, that's your next fix. If a competitor's review page keeps showing up, that's your next campaign.

What to ignore, at least for now.

The AI-SEO discourse has a lot of noise. Some of it is safe to skip.

  • "Prompt injection to make ChatGPT recommend you." Doesn't reliably work, looks spammy in citations, and every provider is actively filtering for it.
  • Buying a hundred low-quality directory listings. Bad idea for Google, worse idea for LLMs, which weight source quality more heavily.
  • AI-generated content at scale, unedited. Assistants can smell their own output and de-weight it. Human editing is the moat.
  • Chasing every new bot user-agent that trends on Twitter. Stick to the five in Chapter 2. The rest can wait until they matter.

Want this done for your business?

A Findy AI report runs the checks in this guide against your actual site and your actual market, tests real Golden Queries in ChatGPT and Perplexity, and hands you a ranked fix list you can start on Monday.

Get your reportSee a sample report