Ask ChatGPT who it would hire in your industry

Before you read the rest of this, head over to ChatGPT and try this. Type in the question your best client probably asked before they found you. Something like "who are the best mid-sized engineering firms in Alberta for pipeline integrity work." Then ask Claude and Perplexity the same thing, just to be thorough.

So, did your name come up? If it did, nice. Go get a coffee, you've earned it. If it didn't, you're in very good company. Most firm owners I talk to have never run this test, and the ones who do are usually surprised by who shows up instead of them.

Here's why it's worth caring about. Your buyers still ask a colleague for a referral first. But right after they get your name, a lot of them open ChatGPT to check you out, or to ask who else they should be talking to. You want to be in that answer.

How do ChatGPT and Claude decide which firms to recommend?

When someone asks an AI tool for a recommendation, it usually runs a quick web search, skims a handful of pages, and writes its answer from whatever those pages say.

For AI to recommend you, three things need to be true.

1. It has to be able to get into your website.

2. Your website has to say plainly what you do, who you do it for, and where.

3. And other websites have to back you up, because these tools trust what other people say about you a lot more than what you say about yourself.

Fair enough, since we all do the same thing with restaurant reviews.

The rest of this post walks you through how to make all three true.

Where does each AI tool get its information?

This is the part almost nobody explains, and it clears up a lot of confusion. Each tool searches a different slice of the web. So if you've been checking your Google rankings and calling it a day, you're only seeing part of the picture.

One more wrinkle. These tools don't search every time. For a lot of questions, they answer from what they learned during training, which is basically a snapshot of the internet from months or even years ago. You can't edit that snapshot. What you can shape is what they find when they do search, and over time, that becomes part of the next snapshot.

Step 1: Make sure AI tools can actually get into your website

I know, it sounds too basic to matter, but it's also the first thing I check, because it's so often the problem. Back in 2023, a lot of firms blocked "AI bots" to keep their content out of training data, which was a reasonable call at the time. The catch is that the same rule can also lock out the bots that decide whether you show up in AI search today.

Check your robots.txt for AI search bots

OpenAI and Anthropic now run separate bots for training and for search, so you can block one and welcome the other. Ask whoever runs your website to check your robots.txt file for OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot and PerplexityBot. Have them look at your firewall or Cloudflare bot settings too. Those can turn crawlers away at the door even when robots.txt looks perfectly friendly.

Submit your site to Bing Webmaster Tools

While they're in there, grab two quick wins. Submit your sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools, because ChatGPT leans on Bing and most firms have only ever set up Google. And make sure the text on your service pages loads without JavaScript. Some crawlers won't sit around waiting for your fancy page animations to finish.

Step 2: Describe your firm the same way everywhere

Do a side-by-side profile check

Here's a fun one. Open your website's About page, your LinkedIn company page, your Google Business Profile and any directory you're listed in. Put them side by side and read them like a stranger would. Most firms I look at describe themselves three or four different ways, depending on who wrote it and what year it was.

You can piece it all together because you know your firm, but an AI tool is working from those pages alone. If your website says "full-service engineering consultancy," LinkedIn says "project management for energy," and your association listing still has your old name, the tool gets confused. And a confused tool won't recommend you for anything specific.

Write one sentence that describes your firm

The fix is one plain sentence that says what you do, who you do it for, and where. Something like "We're a 40-person civil engineering firm that designs water infrastructure for municipalities in Alberta and BC." Use that sentence, or something close to it, on every profile you control. Then get your partners to line up their LinkedIn headlines and About sections with it, since those get read too.

Step 3: Answer the questions buyers are already asking

Think about your last ten first calls. I'd bet the same questions came up in most of them. How long does a project like this take? What does it usually cost? Do you work with firms our size? Why would we pick you over a big national firm? Those are the exact questions people are typing into ChatGPT, and the tool goes looking for a page that answers them.

What to put on each service page

Most firm websites don't have that page. The services page lists what you do in broad strokes and then wraps up with a "contact us" button. Give each core service its own page instead. Say which industries you serve, how big the projects usually are, where you work, and what an engagement looks like from kickoff to wrap-up. A case study or two on the page helps a lot here too. Put the direct answer at the top of each section, then explain it. Your buyers will thank you, and so will the bots.

Should you publish your rates?

You don't have to publish your rates if that makes you twitchy. A range, or a plain explanation of what drives the cost, is still far more helpful than "contact us for a quote." That goes for the buyer reading your site and for the AI tool trying to answer that buyer's question. But don't worry too much about this. I don't even have my rates on my website, but you found me anyway!

Step 4: Get other people talking about you

This step is the one you can't knock out in an afternoon. Ahrefs looked at 75,000 brands and found that how often a brand gets mentioned across the web lines up with AI visibility about three times more closely than backlinks do. In plain English, these tools want to hear other people vouch for you before they'll repeat your name.

Where AI tools look for mentions of your firm

The good news is that for a professional services firm, most of that vouching comes from places you already have a foot in:

• Your industry association's member directory and event speaker pages

• Podcasts and webinars where a partner was a guest

• Trade publications, including the bylined articles nobody on your team has time to write

• Case studies or announcements on your clients' and partners' websites

• Your people posting on LinkedIn about the work they actually do

Why your partners' LinkedIn posts count

This one gets overlooked all the time. When your partners and senior people post on LinkedIn, those posts are public, they're indexed, and they're written in your firm's own words. If three people at your firm post every week about the same few problems you solve, you end up with a long trail of pages that all say the same thing about who you help. That's exactly the kind of pattern these tools pick up on.

What matters less than you've been told

There's a lot of noise around AI search right now, and some of it comes with a pretty big invoice.

Stuffing keywords into your pages won't help you here, and it hasn't helped on Google for years either. Schema markup is nice to have, but adding it on its own didn't lift AI citations in a study of nearly 1,900 pages. And nobody can promise you a spot in a ChatGPT answer. The answers change from day to day and from person to person, so anyone guaranteeing placement is guaranteeing something they can't control.

I'd also be a little skeptical of "you need to be everywhere." Reddit and Quora can help in some industries. For a 30-person accounting firm, though, a strong LinkedIn presence and a few trusted directories will usually do more than a Reddit account nobody on the team wants to babysit.

How to check if your firm shows up in AI search

You don't need a fancy tool for this. You need about an hour a month and a spreadsheet.

1. Write down ten questions a buyer would ask before hiring a firm like yours. Mix broad ones ("best IT consulting firms in Calgary") with specific ones ("who can help a 60-person law firm move to Microsoft 365").

2. Run each one in ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini. Use a temporary or logged-out chat, so your own search history doesn't stack the deck in your favour.

3. Jot down whether you're named, who gets named instead, and which websites each tool lists as its sources.

4. Look hard at that list of sources. Those are the directories, publications and pages worth getting yourself onto.

5. In Google Analytics, check your referral traffic from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and claude.ai, so you can see whether any of this is turning into actual visits.

Run the same ten questions every month. The answers bounce around a bit, so watch the trend over a few months instead of panicking (or celebrating) over one result.

What this looked like for one firm

Last spring, a 45-person engineering firm I worked with ran the same test you did at the top of this post. They asked ChatGPT for the best environmental consulting firms in Alberta for site remediation, which is most of their revenue. Three competitors came up, and they weren't one of them.

When we dug in, they had a problem at every single step. An IT vendor had added a blanket rule that blocked all of OpenAI's bots, search included. Their LinkedIn page called them a "multidisciplinary consultancy," their website led with water resources, and their association listing still used a name they'd dropped in 2021. The only outside mentions of the firm were a couple of old project announcements.

The robots.txt fix took a day, and cleaning up the descriptions took a couple of weeks. The real work was getting two senior engineers posting on LinkedIn every week about remediation projects, and getting a principal onto a panel at an industry conference.

About four months later, they started showing up in ChatGPT and Perplexity for the remediation question, and in Claude for a narrower one about Phase II assessments. A few weeks after that, they got their first inquiry from someone who said they'd found the firm through ChatGPT. The partners still bring that one up at every meeting.

So, where does this leave you?

AI search hasn't replaced referrals, and I don't think it will anytime soon. Most of your best clients will still come from someone who already trusts you. What's changed is what happens right after the referral, when the buyer goes to look you up and the first thing they read is an answer an AI tool wrote about your industry.

The firms that show up in those answers aren't doing anything magical. Their website is easy for the bots to read, their story is the same everywhere, and enough people outside the firm have said good things about them in public. It takes a few months of steady work, and most of your competitors haven't started yet. That's a pretty nice head start if you take it.

If you ran the test at the top of this post and didn't love what you saw, book a call and we'll go through it together.

FAQ

How long does it take to show up in ChatGPT?

The technical fixes in Step 1 can make a difference within a few weeks, once the crawlers come back around to your site. Consistent descriptions and outside mentions take longer. Plan on a few months of steady work before you see a real change.

Is showing up in AI search different from ranking on Google?

There's a lot of overlap. Gemini and Google's AI Overviews use Google's index, and a page that ranks well tends to get read by every tool. The big difference is that AI tools care more about what other sites say about you, and they love pages that answer a question right away. I dug into that shift in more detail in From SEO to AIO.

Should I block AI bots from my website?

It depends on which ones. Block the training bots if you'd rather keep your content out of AI training. Allow the search bots (OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot and PerplexityBot) if you want to show up in answers. You control them separately, so you can do both.

Do I need to hire someone for this?

Not to get started. The monthly check above costs you an hour and a bit of curiosity. Outside help is most useful in Step 4, because getting your partners posting and getting the firm mentioned in the right places is ongoing work that tends to slip when everyone's busy billing. If you're weighing your options, here's how a fractional marketing partner compares to an in-house hire.