Search is changing.
For years, businesses focused primarily on one question:
How do I get my business to rank higher on Google?
That question still matters. But now I hear another one from business owners:
How do I get ChatGPT and other AI search tools to recommend my business?
It’s a good question.
People are increasingly using AI-powered search experiences to research companies, compare services, learn about products, and narrow down their options before making a decision.
That doesn’t mean traditional SEO is dead. Far from it.
What it means is that businesses now need to think about whether their information can be easily found, understood, verified, and connected to the topics they want to be known for across a growing search ecosystem.
As an SEO expert in San Diego, this is something I’m paying close attention to for both my own business and my clients.
Here’s what business owners should understand.
Can You Make ChatGPT Recommend Your Business?
There isn’t a button you can press that tells ChatGPT:
Recommend my company.
And there isn’t a guaranteed optimization trick that will make an AI system recommend you.
Different AI-powered search products use different systems, models, indexes, retrieval methods, partnerships, and sources.
That’s an important distinction because I see increasingly bold claims about “ranking #1 in ChatGPT.”
AI search doesn’t work exactly like a traditional Google results page, and businesses should be skeptical of anyone promising guaranteed placement.
What you can do is strengthen the information and signals that help search engines, AI systems, and potential customers understand your business.
That’s where AI SEO gets interesting.
1. Make It Extremely Clear What Your Business Does
This sounds obvious.
It’s often not.
When I audit websites, I frequently find businesses using vague language such as:
Innovative solutions for a better tomorrow.
Great.
But what does the company actually do?
A person may be willing to hunt through your website to figure that out. Search systems shouldn’t have to.
Your website should clearly communicate:
- What you do
- Who you serve
- Where you operate
- What services or products you provide
- What makes your business relevant to a particular need
For example, my website shouldn’t leave a visitor guessing whether I’m a web designer, social media manager, advertising agency, or SEO consultant.
I want it to be very clear that I provide SEO services and work with businesses that want greater visibility across Google, local search, and increasingly AI-powered search.
Clarity is one of the most underrated parts of SEO.
2. Build Strong Pages Around Your Actual Services
Your website shouldn’t rely on one homepage to explain everything you do.
If a service is important to your business, it usually deserves enough dedicated information for people and search systems to understand it.
That means clearly explaining the service, who it’s for, what problems it addresses, how you approach it, and how someone can take the next step.
This is also why I don’t recommend creating dozens of nearly identical pages just to target keyword variations.
More pages aren’t automatically better.
The goal is to build a website with a clear information architecture where important topics have obvious homes.
For example, I’ve created a dedicated page explaining my AI SEO services in San Diego rather than trying to make every article on my site rank for “AI SEO San Diego.”
The service page owns the commercial topic.
Articles like this one support it.
That’s an important difference.
3. Build Topical Depth Without Repeating Yourself
One article about a subject doesn’t necessarily demonstrate much depth.
But publishing 50 variations of the same article isn’t the solution either.
I prefer building a useful library around related questions.
For AI search, that might include subjects such as:
- AI SEO versus traditional SEO
- Google AI Overviews
- AI search and local SEO
- Generative Engine Optimization
- How AI systems access website information
- Structured content
- Whether ChatGPT can send referral traffic
- What makes a website trustworthy and useful
Each article should have a reason to exist.
Together, they help establish a much clearer picture of what your website is about.
This is one reason I’ve spent so much time consolidating older content on my own website.
I’d rather have fewer strong pages with distinct purposes than hundreds of articles stepping on each other’s toes.
4. Strengthen Your Entity Across the Web
Your website isn’t the only place where information about your business exists.
Think about all the places that can help establish who you are:
Your Google Business Profile.
Professional profiles.
Industry directories.
Local business organizations.
News coverage.
Interviews.
Podcasts.
Social profiles.
Author bios.
Customer reviews.
Other websites mentioning your business.
These references can help create a more consistent public footprint around your business.
For a local company, consistency is especially useful.
If your website says one thing, your Google Business Profile says another, an old directory contains outdated information, and your social profiles barely explain what you do, you’re creating unnecessary ambiguity.
I want the web to tell a consistent story about a business.
5. Earn Mentions From Relevant Third-Party Sources
Backlinks still matter in SEO, but I think business owners should broaden the way they think about online authority.
A valuable third-party mention isn’t valuable merely because there’s a hyperlink attached to it.
It can also put your brand, expertise, people, services, and location into a relevant context.
That’s why I like legitimate digital PR.
For a San Diego business, being mentioned by a respected local publication, professional organization, industry website, community organization, or relevant expert can contribute to a much stronger online presence than publishing another generic article on your own blog.
Don’t manufacture mentions.
Earn reasons for people to talk about your business.
6. Make Your Expertise Easy to Verify
One of my biggest recommendations for businesses adapting to AI search is simple:
Show who is behind the information.
If you publish expert content, identify the author.
Build a useful About page.
Explain relevant experience.
Include legitimate credentials where appropriate.
Show real projects, examples, case studies, results, or first-hand observations when you have them.
This is especially important in industries where trust heavily influences the buying decision.
I’ve worked in SEO for more than 20 years.
I don’t want someone—or a search system—to have to infer that from a generic article.
I want my website and broader online presence to consistently connect:
Jen Ruhman → SEO → San Diego → local SEO → Google search → AI search.
That’s much stronger than simply repeating a keyword 15 times.
7. Use Structured Data Where It Actually Makes Sense
Schema markup can help machines understand certain information on a webpage.
Depending on the page, structured data may identify things such as an organization, person, article, product, service, event, or other supported information.
That’s useful.
But schema is not a magic “rank me in AI” button.
I wouldn’t add random schema simply because someone said it would make ChatGPT recommend your business.
Use appropriate structured data to describe information that genuinely exists on the page.
Think clarity, not hacks.
8. Make Your Content Easy to Understand
Some businesses make their content unnecessarily complicated because they think sophisticated writing sounds authoritative.
Usually, the opposite happens.
Clear headings help.
Direct answers help.
Logical page structure helps.
Descriptive language helps.
Useful examples help.
Original expertise helps.
If someone asks:
What does this company do?
the answer shouldn’t require reading six paragraphs of marketing language.
This applies to humans first.
But making information easier for humans to understand generally creates cleaner information for machines to process as well.
9. Don’t Ignore Traditional Google SEO
This is important.
I would not abandon traditional SEO to chase AI visibility.
AI search exists within a much larger information ecosystem.
Your website still needs to be crawlable.
Your important pages still need internal links.
Your content still needs to satisfy search intent.
Your local SEO still matters.
Your Google Business Profile still matters.
Your reputation still matters.
Your technical SEO still matters.
Your authority still matters.
Your service pages still matter.
In my opinion, businesses that already have a strong SEO foundation are in a much better position to adapt to changes in AI-powered discovery than businesses trying to skip the fundamentals.
10. Give AI Systems Something Worth Finding
This may be the most important point.
Don’t create content simply because you want AI systems to consume it.
Create something useful.
Publish original observations.
Answer questions your customers actually ask.
Share your experience.
Publish case studies.
Explain your process.
Provide data when you have it.
Take a position based on real experience.
Show examples.
AI has made generic content incredibly easy to produce.
That makes first-hand knowledge more valuable, not less.
If your website simply repeats the same information found on thousands of other websites, there’s very little reason for anyone—human or machine—to consider you a particularly valuable source.
What About Local Businesses?
This becomes especially interesting for local businesses.
Someone might traditionally search Google for:
SEO company San Diego
But an AI-style query could be much more conversational:
Who helps small businesses with SEO in San Diego?
What SEO companies in San Diego specialize in local businesses?
Who can help my San Diego business appear in Google and AI search?
Those searches express similar needs differently.
That’s why I don’t think the future of SEO is simply about finding another list of exact-match keywords.
Businesses need to develop strong associations between their brand, services, expertise, location, reputation, and the problems they solve.
How Long Does AI SEO Take?
There isn’t a universal timeline.
And I would be cautious about anyone promising that they’ll get your business recommended by ChatGPT in 30 days.
AI platforms change quickly.
Their underlying systems can change.
The sources they use can change.
Search results and generated responses can vary considerably depending on the query.
That’s another reason I approach AI SEO as an extension of a strong search strategy rather than a short-term trick.
We’re building an online presence that is easier to understand and trust over time.
SEO Is Becoming Bigger Than Ten Blue Links
I’ve been doing SEO long enough to see search change many times.
Mobile search changed it.
Google Maps changed it.
Featured snippets changed it.
Knowledge panels changed it.
AI Overviews changed it again.
ChatGPT and other AI assistants are changing how people discover information too.
I don’t think the answer is to throw traditional SEO away every time the interface changes.
The better strategy is to understand what remains important underneath those changes:
Clear information.
Relevant content.
Strong websites.
Recognizable entities.
Real expertise.
Reputation.
Authority.
Trust.
Those principles have survived a lot of changes in search.
I expect they’ll remain important as AI search continues to evolve.
Want Your San Diego Business to Be Easier to Find in Google and AI Search?
I help businesses improve their visibility across traditional Google search, local search, and emerging AI-powered search experiences.
My approach isn’t about chasing AI hacks or promising guaranteed ChatGPT recommendations.
It’s about building a stronger digital presence that clearly communicates who you are, what you do, where you do it, and why your business is relevant.
Learn more about my AI SEO services in San Diego or request a free SEO analysis to see where I’d start.
Get found. Get trusted. Get chosen.