G
Still the transaction layer
Where the buying still mostly happens; for now.
Not ready to hire an agency? Good. Here is the honest, free playbook we would hand a smart in-house marketer who wants to start showing up in AI search today. No gatekeeping; if you can do it yourself, do it.
This playbook is aimed at ecommerce and DTC brands doing $1M+ in revenue, plus B2B teams with a real category to win. If you are below that, focus your energy on traditional SEO basics and product-market fit first; AI search will still be here when you are bigger.
You have product range, reviews, and category competitors who are already being recommended in AI tools. You have the most to gain.
Considered purchases where buyers ask "what's the best X for Y?" before they ever talk to sales.
One capable marketer who can follow steps and ship. That is genuinely enough to make a start.
Here is the behaviour change that matters. A growing share of buyers now open ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity before they open Google. They ask a full question, in plain language, and they get a synthesised answer naming a handful of brands.
They will still go to Google to make the transaction; to read reviews, compare prices, find the exact product page, and buy. But the shortlist was built inside an AI tool. If your brand was not in that synthesised answer, you never made the shortlist; and Google never even got the chance to rank you.
This will keep shifting. Agentic browsing means the AI may soon do the comparing and even the buying itself. The four surfaces to care about today:
Where the buying still mostly happens; for now.
The biggest answer engine; where most AI discovery starts.
Favoured by technical and professional buyers.
Shows its sources; great for earning visible citations.
Open ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity. Ask "what's the best [your category] in Australia?" and "tell me about [your brand]." Write down what they say. This is your free baseline; if you are not mentioned, or the facts are wrong, that is your to-do list.
Check your robots.txt. Make sure GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended and Bingbot are not blocked. Most sites accidentally block at least one. If they cannot crawl you, they cannot cite you.
A plain-text file at yoursite.com/llms.txt that tells AI tools who you are, what you sell, and which pages matter. Think of it as a robots.txt written for language models. See ours for reference.
Put the direct answer in the first sentence of every page and every section. AI tools lift sentences; give them a clean one to lift. Bury the answer in paragraph eight and you will never be quoted.
Real questions your buyers ask, with short clear answers, marked up with FAQPage schema. This is the single highest-leverage thing most ecom brands can ship in a week.
AI models count brand mentions, even without a link. Get written about in industry blogs, quoted in press, recommended on Reddit (honestly), reviewed on independent sites. Mentions are the new backlinks for AEO.
Crunchbase, Wikidata, your Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, industry directories. Make the basic facts about your brand consistent everywhere. This is how AI confirms who you are.
"[You] vs [competitor]" and "best [category] for [use case]" pages. These are exactly the questions buyers ask AI tools. Answer them honestly on your own site and you become a source.
Prices, specs, dates. AI tools (especially AI Overviews and Perplexity) favour current information. Stale pages get skipped. Add a visible "last updated" date.
Run step one again every month. Track whether you are getting mentioned more, and for which queries. AI visibility moves; treat it like a habit, not a one-off project.
Book a free 30-minute audit. We will tell you exactly which of these you have nailed, which you have missed, and whether paying for help is even worth it yet.