People used to type “memphis divorce lawyer” into Google and scroll. Now a lot of them open ChatGPT and ask, “Who’s a good divorce lawyer in Memphis who handles custody?” They get one answer with a few names in it. Those firms get the call, and everyone else never knew they were in the running.
That’s what we mean by AI visibility: whether your business comes up when someone asks an AI tool who to hire. Here’s how those tools decide, what you can do about it and what nobody can promise you.
How AI tools decide who to mention
ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google’s AI answers don’t keep a secret list of approved businesses. They put an answer together from what they can find and read about you, and they lean on sources they trust.
In practice that means your own website, your Google Business Profile, directories and review sites, and anything other sites have written about you. When those sources agree on what you do, where you do it and that people are happy with the work, you’re an easy recommendation. When your site is vague, your hours are different on every listing and you have a handful of reviews from 2021, you’re hard to recommend, and the tool moves on to someone it understands better.
Lead with the answer
We said this on LinkedIn recently, and it’s worth repeating: your best answer shouldn’t be hiding in paragraph four.
Search engines and AI tools scan your pages to work out what you do, what problem you solve and whether your content is useful enough to reference. So we’ve changed how we write website content. Lead with the answer. Explain how you solve it. Then give people the details and the reasoning behind it.
That doesn’t mean shallow content. It means the important part is easy to find, for a person skimming on a phone and for a tool deciding whether to quote you.
What actually moves it
Most of the work overlaps with good SEO, which is why we usually fold it into an SEO plan instead of selling it separately.
Answer the questions your customers ask. Not “our services” in general, but the real questions. How much does it cost? How long does it take? Do you handle this specific situation? Pages and FAQ sections that answer them plainly are the easiest thing for an AI tool to pick up and repeat.
Make your facts match everywhere. Your business name, address, phone number, services and hours should be identical on your site, your Google Business Profile and every directory that lists you. Mixed signals make you harder to trust.
Help machines read your site. Clean headings, schema markup and FAQ sections tell search engines and AI tools exactly what each page is about. Our own new site is built this way, down to a plain-text summary file written for AI crawlers.
Earn mentions from real sites. Reviews, local press, association pages and client write-ups all count. AI tools trust what other people say about you more than what you say about yourself.
What we can measure, and what we can’t
Nobody controls what an AI tool says. Anyone guaranteeing you a spot in ChatGPT is guessing. The answers change with how the question is worded and with every model update.
What we can do is check. Each month we ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google’s AI answers the same questions your customers ask, record whether you show up, and walk you through the answers in your monthly video along with what we changed.
We can also watch the traffic. For one client, WISPR Systems, visits from AI assistants rose about 377% from the second quarter to the third quarter of 2026. Part of that is more people using AI tools, and part is the search work that helps those tools understand what WISPR does. We think both matter.
One more thing: you can run ads in ChatGPT now
Most business owners we talk to don’t know this yet. ChatGPT now shows ads to people on its Free and Go plans. OpenAI says the ads are labeled, kept separate from the answers and don’t influence what ChatGPT recommends. In May, OpenAI opened a self-serve Ads Manager to U.S. advertisers in beta, so this isn’t just for big brands with agency contracts anymore.
It’s a new channel with its own rules, and we’ll have more on it soon.
See what AI says about you
Tell us your business and three questions your customers ask. We’ll show you what the AI tools say today and what we’d change first.
Check my AI visibility or call us at 901-522-5002.
