How to show up in AI search: optimising for ChatGPT and Perplexity

Here's the short version, because everyone's circling it with "thought leadership" instead of saying it: how to show up in AI search comes down to three unglamorous jobs, not a strategy deck. Let the AI crawlers in, write the answer to a real question plainly near the top of the page, and drop an llms.txt file at your domain root pointing the engines at your best pages. That's the bulk of it. The rest of this is the why, the order I'd do it in, and the bits the hype merchants leave out, because most of "AI SEO" being sold right now is the old SEO snake oil with a new label on the bottle.

First, understand what you're actually optimising for

Old search hands you ten blue links and you pick one. ChatGPT and Perplexity read a pile of pages, write a paragraph, and name a couple of sources. The prize isn't a ranking any more — it's getting quoted. That's the whole shift, and it changes the job. You're not trying to be the tenth-best page on a topic so you scrape onto page one; you're trying to have the one clean, liftable sentence that answers the exact question, so the engine grabs yours.

This has a name now — answer-engine optimisation, or AEO. Ignore the jargon. It's the same instinct good tradespeople have always had: say the useful thing first, plainly, and don't make people dig for it. The machines just reward it more obviously than Google ever did.

The bot you're locking out without knowing it

Start here, because it's the one that quietly sinks people. Every AI engine sends its own crawler, and a lot of websites, plugins and "privacy" tools block them by default. If your robots.txt tells these bots to get lost, you are invisible to that engine — it physically cannot read you, so it cannot cite you. No clever copy fixes a locked door.

The ones that matter, and that you want to allow:

• GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot — OpenAI, i.e. ChatGPT.
• PerplexityBot — Perplexity.
• ClaudeBot — Anthropic's Claude.
• Google-Extended — Google's Gemini and the AI Overview answers.

Open your robots.txt (it lives at yourdomain.com.au/robots.txt) and make sure none of those sit under a Disallow. My blunt take: for a small business, being named as the local expert inside an AI answer is advertising you'd happily pay for, so let them in. The only people who should block these are those who'd genuinely rather AI never mentioned them — and that's almost nobody who's trying to get found. If you want to draw a line, block the training-only crawlers like CCBot and keep the search-and-cite ones open. That's the sensible middle.

Write the answer so a machine can lift it

This is where the real work is, and it's writing, not tooling. An engine doesn't quote your page; it quotes a passage from it. So every page that targets a question should answer that question plainly, near the top, in a paragraph that stands on its own without the three paragraphs of throat-clearing above it.

Practically, that means:

1. Lead with the answer, then back it up. Put the verdict in the first hundred words. "A small brochure site sits in the low thousands" beats "pricing depends on many factors" every single time, because the first one is quotable and the second one is noise.
2. Use headings that match how people ask. Real questions as your H2s — "How much does it cost?", "Do I need one?" — not cute marketing labels. The engine maps the question to your heading.
3. Keep the core answer tight. Roughly forty to sixty words is the sweet spot for a passage an engine can lift whole. Say the thing, then expand below it for the humans who want the detail.
4. Add a real FAQ at the bottom. Natural-language questions with straight answers. It's the single most quotable block on a page, which is exactly why this article has one.

The trap to avoid: do not write a separate "AI version" of your content, keyword-stuffed and robotic. Google explicitly calls that scaled content abuse and it can earn you a penalty, not a citation. Write one good page for a human and structure it so a machine can read it too. That's not two jobs — it's one job done properly. Keyword stuffing actively goes backwards here; the engines are reading for meaning, not counting your repetitions.

Add an llms.txt — five minutes, do it

Think of llms.txt as robots.txt's helpful cousin. It's a plain Markdown file at your domain root that gives an AI engine a quick map of your site: a line on what you do, then links to your most important pages. It's an open convention (see llmstxt.org), not an official Google ranking signal, and it won't rescue a thin site. But it's a few minutes of work, it can't hurt, and the non-Google engines do read tidy machine-readable files when you bother to provide them. A barebones one looks like this:

# Your Business Name
> One plain line on what you do and who you do it for.

## Key pages
- [Services](https://yourdomain.com.au/services.html): what you offer
- [About](https://yourdomain.com.au/about.html): who you are
- [Contact](https://yourdomain.com.au/contact.html): how to reach you

While you're at it, if you sell something with set prices, a plain /pricing.md file in the same spirit helps too — AI agents increasingly compare options for a buyer before a human ever lands on your site, and they skip whatever they can't read. Don't hide your prices behind a "contact us" wall and a wall of JavaScript and then wonder why the robot recommended someone else.

The part nobody selling "AI SEO" wants to admit

Half your AI visibility isn't on your website at all. These engines cite where you appear — a local directory, a review site, an industry roundup, a Reddit thread — often ahead of your own pages, because a third party vouching for you reads as more trustworthy than you vouching for yourself. So the off-site work matters: accurate listings in the directories that cover your trade, real reviews where your industry actually leaves them, getting named in a "best X in [your town]" piece. That's not a growth hack — it's being genuinely present where people already talk about your kind of work.

And the boring foundation underneath all of it: a fast, clean, properly structured website. AI engines read the same HTML a browser does, so if your content only appears after four frameworks finish loading, the bot sees a blank page. Semantic HTML, real headings, content that's actually in the page — the fundamentals that make a site rank and load well are the same ones that make it readable to a machine. There's no separate AI website; there's a good website, and AI rewards it. It's the groundwork the whole cluster of get-found guides sits on.

The honest order to do this in

Don't boil the ocean. Work down this list and you'll have done more than nearly every competitor in your area:

1. Unblock the bots. Check robots.txt, allow the five crawlers above. Free, five minutes, and the one that stops you being invisible.
2. Fix your top three pages. Lead each with a plain answer, question-shaped headings, a real FAQ at the bottom. This is the work that gets you quoted.
3. Add llms.txt (and /pricing.md if you sell something priced). A few minutes; helps the non-Google engines.
4. Get present off-site. Accurate directory listings, real reviews, an honest mention or two where your trade gets discussed.
5. Sort the foundation. If the site's slow or the content doesn't render cleanly, fix that — it's holding back your normal search too.

Notice what's not on the list: paying a monthly "AI visibility" subscription to a tool that promises to "optimise you for ChatGPT." You don't need it to get started, and most of what they'd do is the five steps above. This is the same call as the older question of whether to spend on SEO or Google Ads first — get the free, structural wins in the bag before anyone takes a retainer off you.

What "showing up" actually looks like

A business that shows up in AI answers isn't one that gamed an algorithm — it's one with a clean, fast site, real answers to the questions its customers actually ask, the bots let in, an llms.txt doing its quiet job, and an honest footprint in the places people already look. Set up like that, you stop chasing each new engine as it launches. You just have a website worth quoting, and the engines find it the same way a customer would — because it's clearly the one that answers the question.

Frequently asked questions

Want this done rather than fiddled with? We build small-business sites that are fast, clean and structured to be found — by Google and by the AI engines — and we'll set up your robots.txt, llms.txt and the answer-shaped pages as part of the job, no monthly "AI" subscription bolted on. It's also part of our get-online bundle for new businesses who want the lot sorted in one go. Tell us what you do and who you do it for, and we'll tell you straight where your first effort is best spent.