I watched my mom pull out her phone last week to look up something about sodium and long-term blood pressure. She didn't Google it. She asked ChatGPT. And she did it the way you'd ask a person, not the way you'd type a search.
It wasn't a big moment. Random weekday, kitchen, nothing special. But it stuck with me, because we've all been Googling for what, twenty-some years? And the switch didn't come with an announcement. It just happened, quietly, to a woman who does not care about any of this.
Here's the part that actually got me though. She has no idea how those answers got in front of her. And the businesses in those answers? That wasn't luck. Somebody built those sites so a machine could read them, understand them, and repeat them back with confidence. Most sites can't do that. Yours probably can't.
Why doesn't AI mention your business?
Three reasons, and it's almost always one of them.
It can't see you. Your site might be blocking the crawlers. A crawler is just an automated bot that reads through your site so a search engine or an AI knows what's there. Block it, intentionally or not, and you don't exist to them.
It can't understand you. Vague site, no clear facts, no structure. The machine reads it and comes away with nothing it can state confidently. So it doesn't state anything.
It can't verify you. Your name, address, hours, services say one thing on Google, something else on Bing, something else on your own site. Nothing lines up, so nothing gets trusted.
Most local sites do at least one of these wrong and don't know it.
Which search engine does ChatGPT actually use?
Everybody optimizes for Google. Fine. But ChatGPT's search doesn't start with Google — it leans on Bing's index plus OpenAI's own crawler. Microsoft Copilot runs on Bing outright. Google's AI Overviews and Gemini use Google's index, so your normal Google work covers those. Perplexity built its own crawler and mostly runs on that. And if you use Claude like I do, that one leans on Brave Search. Different index again.
Read that again. If Bing hasn't indexed you, you're invisible to the index ChatGPT leans on hardest. Your Google rankings don't carry over.
Claiming your Bing Places listing is free and takes about ten minutes. Almost no local business has done it. That's a free W sitting on the table because everyone's staring at Google.
Do you actually need llms.txt?
You've probably seen people pushing llms.txt. It's a little file you put on your site that tells AI tools who you are and what you do. Business card for machines, basically. We ship one on our own site.
Here's what nobody selling it will tell you: it mostly isn't being read.
Ahrefs looked at 137,000 domains and found 97 percent of the valid llms.txt files got zero requests. Zero. Google has said flat out, in their own docs, that they don't use it — not for Search and not for AI Overviews. Google's own John Mueller compared it to the old keywords meta tag, which if you don't know, is the thing spammers stuffed for years until Google stopped looking at it entirely. One study of more than 500 million AI bot requests found the crawlers overwhelmingly skip the file and just read your regular HTML instead.
So why do we still have one? Because it's genuinely useful for a different thing. Coding agents and agentic browsers do read it, and Microsoft's and OpenAI's crawlers do fetch it sometimes. Anthropic, Stripe, Cloudflare all ship one. They're not doing it for rankings. They know better. They're building for where this goes next.
That's a real reason. "It'll get you cited in ChatGPT" is not. If somebody's charging you for AI optimization, ask them to name the system that actually reads what they're building for you. If they can't answer that, you're paying for decoration.
So what actually moves the needle?
The boring stuff. Content that says something specific instead of hedging. Structured data so a machine can parse what you do. Your business facts matching everywhere they appear. Reviews and a complete Google Business Profile, because local AI answers lean hard on Maps data. Bing claimed, since that's ChatGPT's eyes.
None of that is exciting. All of it works.
How long until AI starts mentioning you?
The setup is quick. One afternoon for most of it, ten minutes for Bing. But the trust part takes weeks, sometimes months, because you're building a track record a machine can verify and that doesn't happen on a Tuesday.
Anybody telling you ChatGPT will be recommending you by Friday is selling you a dream. Nobody controls these tools. What you control is whether you're readable, verifiable, and consistent. That's it. That's the whole job.
If you want to know where you stand, send me your site and mention this post, and I'll check your Bing listing and your setup and tell you what's actually broken. Takes me a few minutes and it's free.
Because right now, somewhere, somebody's mom is asking a chatbot who to call. And it's going to name somebody.
