Do you need a special plan to show up in AI search? Mostly, no.

If you own a service business, you have probably seen the pitch by now. "AI search is changing everything. Get ready for ChatGPT and Google's AI answers before your competitors do." Then comes a price and a new acronym.

Here's my position: most of what you've been told to buy is unnecessary, and the people who know best say so themselves.

What Google says you need

Google has a page on how AI features work with your website. Its answer to the obvious question is short: "There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary."

The same page says your page has to be indexed and eligible to show a snippet in regular Search. That's the technical bar. It also says you don't need new machine-readable files, AI-specific text files, or special schema markup to qualify.

So if someone is selling you an "AI optimization file" for your site, ask them to show you where Google asks for it.

What OpenAI says you need

ChatGPT works a little differently, but OpenAI's own documentation is just as plain. Its page on its crawlers says the OAI-SearchBot is "used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT's search features." To improve your odds of appearing, it recommends allowing that bot in your robots.txt file.

That's a setting, not a project. It's also worth a look because some sites block bots by default without anyone deciding to. And note the wording: OpenAI recommends and says "may." Nothing on that page guarantees inclusion or a ranking, and neither does any consultant.

Where the real work still is

Neither company gives you a secret. What they describe is the ordinary list: a site that can be crawled, pages with real text on them, and content that answers what people ask. For a local business, there's one more piece. Google's own help page says local results are based on relevance, distance, and prominence, where prominence "means how well-known a business is." That's your Google Business Profile, your reviews, and your reputation, and none of it is a trick.

I wrote about the profile side in your Google Business Profile is probably broken. If you haven't checked yours in a year, start there before you pay anyone for anything with "AI" in the name.

Here's a typical version of how this goes wrong. Say a plumber with a six-year-old site pays a monthly fee for "AI visibility." Meanwhile the Business Profile lists the wrong primary category, the last review is from 2024, and the site's service pages are three sentences each. The fee can't fix any of that. The boring fixes could.

What I would do first

• Check that your robots.txt isn't blocking search crawlers you want, including OAI-SearchBot.
• Confirm your key pages are indexed in Google Search Console.
• Fix the Business Profile: category, hours, services, photos, and a steady trickle of real reviews.
• Make each service page answer the questions customers ask before they hire you, with your actual process and your actual price range.

That list is what my SEO service covers, from $500 a month, month to month. It's the same work whether the answer shows up in a list of blue links or in a paragraph written by a chatbot. If your customers come entirely from referrals, or your market is small, I'll tell you on the call that you may not need it.

What I won't tell you

I won't tell you that doing the above gets you cited by ChatGPT or placed in an AI Overview. Nobody can promise that, and I explain why in why I don't promise rankings. The systems change, they pick sources differently from one another, and Google says AI Overviews often don't appear at all.

What I can say is that the fundamentals are cheap, they help you in every kind of search, and they're the only things the platforms themselves point to. Spend there first. If a new requirement ever shows up in Google's or OpenAI's documentation, it will be published, and you won't need a salesperson to find it.

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Want someone to check your robots.txt, your indexing, and your Business Profile? See what the monthly SEO work includes, then send me your site address.