How Customers Find You Now: SEO for Google, ChatGPT, and Claude

Three places people look

When someone needs a plumber or a bookkeeper, they usually look in one of three places: the map listing in Google, the regular Google results under it, or an AI answer. That AI answer might be the summary at the top of Google, or it might come from asking ChatGPT or Claude directly.

The AI answers feel like a new thing you're supposed to work on separately, and plenty of people will sell you that. But ChatGPT and Claude mostly run ordinary searches behind the scenes and summarize what they find. ChatGPT mostly uses Bing, while Claude uses Brave Search. Google's own guidance from May 2026 says that showing up in its AI features is "still SEO."

So good SEO, the work that gets you found on Google, is most of the work that gets you named by the AI tools.

What still works

• Your Google Business Profile, first. For most local businesses it brings in more calls than the website does. I wrote more about it in What a Google Business Profile Is.
• Reviews, a few every month. They matter on the map, and they show up in AI answers too. See Managing Your Online Reviews.
• One real page for each service. Answer the question customers actually ask near the top, give a price range, and use photos of your own work. That's the kind of page AI answers quote.
• Mentions on other sites. Review sites, local directories, your trade association, the local paper. AI tools repeat what other sites say about you.
• Bing. ChatGPT gets many of its results there, and a lot of businesses that rank fine on Google barely appear on Bing. Bing Places is free.

What's a waste of money

• Paying separately for "AI visibility," "AEO," or "GEO." The people who do this work every day mostly call it the same work as SEO under a new name and a higher price.
• An llms.txt file. It was pitched as a way into AI answers. An Ahrefs study of 137,000 sites found 97% of those files went a whole month without a single request. If it comes free, great. But it's not something worth paying for.
• Publishing a lot of pages fast. Google's updates in 2026 hit sites that put up hundreds of near-identical pages at once, like a "plumber in" page copied for every nearby town with only the town name changed. A few good pages beat a pile of thin ones.

Expect fewer clicks

When an AI answer covers a question, fewer people click through to a website. For "how do I..." questions, that drop is big. But people looking for someone to come fix something still pick up the phone.

That makes one habit more important than it used to be: ask every new customer how they found you, and write it down. Someone who sees your name in ChatGPT or Claude often searches for you on Google afterward, so it looks like an ordinary Google visit. Asking is the only way to know.

The full guide

I read 198 discussions from people who do search work every day, checked them against Google's own guidance, and put what holds up into a free guide with a printable checklist: Getting Found on Google, ChatGPT, and Claude: A Small Business SEO Guide. There's no signup, and you can read it on the page or download the PDF.