How AI search finds your business: Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity explained

Why this matters for a small business

Buyers increasingly ask an assistant a full question — "which accounting software works best for a small building firm?" — and read a summarised answer with a handful of links. Google describes AI Mode as especially useful for comparisons and multi-step questions, and says it shows a wider set of supporting links than a classic search ^[1].

Being one of those links depends on the same fundamentals as ordinary search: pages that can be crawled, that answer the question clearly, and that are trusted.

How Google's AI features choose pages

Google states that to be eligible as a supporting link, a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet; there are no additional technical requirements ^[1].

Its recommended practices are familiar: allow crawling in robots.txt, link pages internally, provide a good page experience, keep important content in text form, and make sure structured data matches the visible text ^[1].

The crawlers behind the assistants

• Googlebot crawls for Search, including AI Overviews and AI Mode; Google-Extended is a separate token that controls use of content for training and grounding in some other Google AI systems ^[1][2].
• OpenAI documents OAI-SearchBot, used to surface websites in ChatGPT search, separately from GPTBot, which relates to training its models ^[3].
• Perplexity documents PerplexityBot, used to surface and link websites in its answers ^[4].
• Bing and several other engines accept IndexNow notifications, which tell them instantly that a page was added or changed ^[5].

A practical checklist

• Allow the search crawlers you want in robots.txt and publish an up-to-date sitemap.
• Write pages that answer one question well, with the key facts near the top.
• Cite primary sources — legislation, GOV.UK, the regulator — so the answer can be checked.
• Use structured data (Organization, Article, FAQ, Breadcrumb) that mirrors what is on the page ^[1].
• Measure it: clicks from AI features are counted in the Search Console performance report ^[1].

What we do on this site

Every Nemexio guide is plain text, dated, internally linked and ends with numbered official sources. Our robots.txt allows the main search and AI search crawlers, and a short llms.txt file summarises the site for AI assistants.