{"id":37808,"date":"2026-10-26T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-10-26T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hdkn-solutions.com\/?p=37808"},"modified":"2026-10-08T23:25:00","modified_gmt":"2026-10-08T21:25:00","slug":"visibility-chatgpt-ai-assistants-small-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hdkn-solutions.com\/en\/news\/visibility-chatgpt-ai-assistants-small-business\/","title":{"rendered":"Showing up in ChatGPT and AI assistants: what actually works for a small business"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"hx-brief\">\n<p class=\"hx-brief__t\">In short<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Since late 2024, ChatGPT also searches the web and cites its sources, as Perplexity and Copilot did before it. Their answers draw on search engines, business websites and online directories.<\/li>\n<li>For a small business, the levers that matter are well known: a readable website, a well-kept Google Business Profile, consistent information everywhere and mentions on other websites.<\/li>\n<li>The llms.txt file and promises of &#8220;guaranteed AI rankings&#8221; are not a priority.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<p>&#8220;I asked ChatGPT.&#8221; The phrase has become commonplace, including among people looking for a contractor, a restaurant or a web agency. In Quebec, 52% of internet users had already used a generative AI tool by fall 2025, up from 33% a year earlier, and ChatGPT is by far the most popular. People no longer just type keywords into Google: they ask an assistant a full question and read the answer.<\/p>\n<p>So the question for a business becomes: when someone asks an AI &#8220;which agency should redo my website in Montreal?&#8221; or &#8220;a good plumber in Laval?&#8221;, does your name come up? And if not, what can you do about it? Here&#8217;s what we know, with evidence, and what we recommend.<\/p>\n<h2>How we got here<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>October 31, 2024<\/strong>: OpenAI launches web search in ChatGPT. The assistant no longer answers only from memory: it fetches pages and cites them.<\/li>\n<li><strong>February 5, 2025<\/strong>: search in ChatGPT becomes available without an account.<\/li>\n<li><strong>March to May 2025<\/strong>: Claude, Anthropic&#8217;s assistant, adds web search too, first in the United States and then everywhere.<\/li>\n<li><strong>August 21, 2025<\/strong>: Google&#8217;s AI Mode arrives in Canada in English, then in French on October 14.<\/li>\n<li><strong>October 2025<\/strong>: ChatGPT claims 800 million weekly users. It passes 900 million in February 2026.<\/li>\n<li><strong>February 10, 2026<\/strong>: Microsoft adds an &#8220;AI Performance&#8221; report to Bing Webmaster Tools, showing when a site is cited by Copilot.<\/li>\n<li><strong>August 11, 2026<\/strong>: Google&#8217;s Gemini app passes one billion monthly users.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>Where assistants get their answers<\/h2>\n<p>That&#8217;s the key question, and the answer is less mysterious than you might think.<\/p>\n<h3>Search engines<\/h3>\n<p>When ChatGPT searches the web, it goes through partner search engines. OpenAI doesn&#8217;t say which ones, but a study by the agency Seer Interactive showed in early 2025 that 87% of the sources cited by ChatGPT appeared in Bing&#8217;s top 20 results. A broader Ahrefs study of 15,000 questions, published in August 2025, strongly qualifies this: for ChatGPT, only about 8% of cited pages were in Google&#8217;s or Bing&#8217;s top 10. The cautious conclusion: ranking well helps, but the assistant also looks further afield.<\/p>\n<h3>Sources the business controls<\/h3>\n<p>A Yext study of 6.8 million citations found that 86% of the sources cited by assistants are content managed by brands themselves: their websites (44%) and their listings on directories and platforms (42%). It&#8217;s a vendor study, to be read with some caution, but it matches what we see: your website and your listings are the raw material.<\/p>\n<h3>Local listings<\/h3>\n<p>For local searches, assistants rely heavily on business listings and directories. According to a BrightLocal analysis, Google&#8217;s AI Mode draws extensively on Google Business Profiles. Reviews, opening hours, categories and photos therefore play a direct role.<\/p>\n<h3>What others say about you<\/h3>\n<p>An Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands found that brand mentions on other websites were far more closely linked to visibility in Google&#8217;s AI answers than backlinks. It&#8217;s a correlation, not proof of cause and effect. But it makes sense: an AI is more likely to pick up a business that local media, partners or customers talk about.<\/p>\n<h2>What actually works<\/h2>\n<h3>1. A website bots can read<\/h3>\n<p>Make sure your site doesn&#8217;t block search engine and assistant crawlers. For ChatGPT, OAI-SearchBot is the crawler that matters for appearing in search results. Blocking GPTBot, the crawler used to train models, doesn&#8217;t stop you from being cited. And key information (services, prices, service area, opening hours, address) needs to be written as text, not locked inside images.<\/p>\n<h3>2. Pages that answer real questions<\/h3>\n<p>Assistants pick up precise information: &#8220;starting at $2,500&#8221;, &#8220;on site within 48 hours&#8221;, &#8220;Montreal, Laval and the South Shore&#8221;. A page that clearly answers a question your customers ask is far more likely to be cited than a page about &#8220;innovative solutions&#8221;. And if your customers are bilingual, your pages should be too: people ask assistants questions in their own language.<\/p>\n<h3>3. A flawless Google Business Profile<\/h3>\n<p>Accurate categories, up-to-date hours, detailed services, recent photos, regular reviews and a reply to every review. It&#8217;s the most cost-effective lever for a local business, whether the search goes through Google, Gemini or another assistant.<\/p>\n<h3>4. The same information everywhere<\/h3>\n<p>Name, address, phone number, opening hours: identical on your website, your Google profile, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, YellowPages.ca, Yelp, the directories in your industry and your social media. An AI that finds two different addresses hesitates, and an AI that hesitates cites someone else.<\/p>\n<h3>5. Get people talking about you<\/h3>\n<p>An article in local media, a mention on the website of an association, a partner or a trade show, a customer testimonial published somewhere other than your own site. It&#8217;s long-term work, but it&#8217;s what builds a reputation, in the eyes of humans and AIs alike.<\/p>\n<h3>6. Measure what can be measured<\/h3>\n<p>Traffic from Google&#8217;s AI answers is counted in Search Console, along with everything else. Bing Webmaster Tools now shows citations in Copilot. And the simplest measure is still the best: ask every new customer how they found you.<\/p>\n<h2>What doesn&#8217;t help (for now)<\/h2>\n<p><strong>The llms.txt file.<\/strong> Proposed in 2024 to &#8220;guide&#8221; AIs through a website, it&#8217;s all over LinkedIn. In June 2025, Google&#8217;s John Mueller pointed out that no AI system was using it. Google&#8217;s guide, updated in July 2026, confirms it: no special file is needed, and Google Search doesn&#8217;t use it. It doesn&#8217;t hurt, but it&#8217;s not where you should spend your time.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Promises of &#8220;guaranteed AI rankings&#8221;.<\/strong> Nobody controls what an assistant answers. Be wary of offers promising to get you into ChatGPT within two weeks.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Mass-producing content.<\/strong> Dozens of automatically generated articles help neither your image nor your visibility. AIs, like Google, look for reliable, precise sources.<\/p>\n<h2>Our take<\/h2>\n<p>There&#8217;s a lot of talk about GEO, &#8220;AI SEO&#8221; or AIO, as if everything had to be reinvented. In reality, the foundations are the same as for good local SEO: a clear, fast website, precise and consistent information, a well-kept Google profile and a reputation built over time. The difference is that mistakes cost you faster, because the AI picks a handful of sources where Google used to show ten links. To go further on Google, read our article on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.hdkn-solutions.com\/en\/news\/google-ai-overviews-ai-mode-canada\/\">AI Overviews and AI Mode<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>If you want to know what AI assistants say about your business today, we can run the test with you, in French and in English, and tell you what to fix first. It&#8217;s the starting point of our <a href=\"https:\/\/www.hdkn-solutions.com\/en\/seo-google-ads-montreal\/\">SEO services<\/a>, in Montreal or remotely. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.hdkn-solutions.com\/en\/contact\/\">Contact us<\/a>.<\/p>\n<h2>Sources<\/h2>\n<ul class=\"hx-sources\">\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/nouvelles.ulaval.ca\/2026\/03\/19\/plus-de-la-moitie-des-internautes-du-quebec-utilisent-un-outil-dintelligence-artificielle-generative-592272b3-7325-49a4-ba10-2493f8815200\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Universit\u00e9 Laval, NETendances on generative AI, March 2026 (in French)<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/openai.com\/index\/introducing-chatgpt-search\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">OpenAI, introducing ChatGPT search<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/developers.openai.com\/api\/docs\/bots\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">OpenAI, crawlers (OAI-SearchBot, GPTBot)<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/blog.google\/intl\/en-ca\/products\/explore-get-answers\/google-search-introducing-ai-mode-in-canada\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Canada, introducing AI Mode in Canada, August 2025<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.seerinteractive.com\/insights\/87-percent-of-searchgpt-citations-match-bings-top-results\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Seer Interactive, ChatGPT citations and Bing results, 2025<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/ahrefs.com\/blog\/ai-search-overlap\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Ahrefs, overlap between AI search and search engines, August 2025<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.businesswire.com\/news\/home\/20251009106549\/en\/Yext-Research-86-of-AI-Citations-Come-from-Brand-Managed-Sources-Clarifying-How-Marketers-Can-Compete-in-the-AI-Search-Era\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Yext, where AI citations come from, October 2025<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.brightlocal.com\/blog\/ai-search-using-listings-sources\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">BrightLocal, sources used by local AI search, July 2025<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/ahrefs.com\/blog\/ai-overview-brand-correlation\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Ahrefs, brand mentions and AI answers, May 2025<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2026\/02\/27\/chatgpt-reaches-900m-weekly-active-users\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">TechCrunch, ChatGPT reaches 900 million weekly users, February 2026<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/blog.google\/innovation-and-ai\/products\/gemini-app\/one-billion-monthly-users\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Google, the Gemini app passes one billion monthly users, August 2026<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.bing.com\/webmaster\/February-2026\/Introducing-AI-Performance-in-Bing-Webmaster-Tools-Public-Preview\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bing, AI Performance report, February 2026<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/developers.google.com\/search\/docs\/fundamentals\/ai-optimization-guide\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Google Search Central, guide to optimizing for AI<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>More and more of your customers ask ChatGPT or Gemini before they go to Google. Where do these assistants get their answers, and what can you actually do so your business shows up in them?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":37807,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"Visible in ChatGPT: what works for a small business | HDKN","_seopress_titles_desc":"ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity cite their sources. 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