Found on Google and ChatGPT: what your website needs

Anyone looking for an electrician, a tax adviser or a café today no longer types only into Google. More and more people ask an AI assistant such as ChatGPT, or they read the AI overview Google shows above the search results. The AI then names a few businesses. The question is: is yours among them?

The good news: there is no secret trick. The same basics that make a website do well on Google also help in AI answers. Google says so itself: for AI Overviews and AI Mode there are no additional requirements beyond the proven basics.

1. Content that answers questions

Search engines and AI assistants want to give their users a good answer. They prefer pages that answer a question clearly and completely. For your business that means: what do you offer, for whom, where, at what price, and why you?

• Every service gets its own understandable description, not just a keyword in a list.
• Your location and service area are in the text, not only in the legal notice.
• Common customer questions are answered directly on the page.
• You write from your own experience. Google explicitly recommends content with its own perspective over common knowledge found everywhere.

2. A structure machines can read

A page must not only look good to people, it must also be understandable to programs. That includes a clean outline with headings, a sitemap listing all pages and unambiguous addresses. It is also important that the text is already in the delivered HTML. Pages that assemble their content in the browser with JavaScript make it unnecessarily hard for search programs.

Structured data is additional information in the source code that clearly marks things like company name, service, price or frequently asked questions. According to Google it is not required for Google’s AI features. It still makes sense: data about your company, articles or breadcrumbs makes your page eligible for rich results. The once popular expandable FAQ results, however, have only been shown for government and health sites since 2023.

3. Speed: the Core Web Vitals

Google measures how fast and stable a page loads for real visitors. These measurements are called Core Web Vitals. According to Google, good values are:

Good values alone will not lift you if the content does not fit. Bad values, however, lose visitors before they have read a word. Why custom sites have an edge here is explained in Built, not clicked together .

4. Visible locally: the Google Business Profile

For businesses with local customers the Google Business Profile is often more important than the website itself. It appears in Google Maps and in the map view of search, with opening hours, reviews and photos. A complete, current profile with regular posts is one of the most effective measures for local visibility. How we take care of it is on our page about the Google Business Profile .

What you can safely ignore

Lots of new advice is going around about AI search. Google explicitly corrects some of it in its guide to AI search (opens in a new tab) :

• Special AI files such as llms.txt: Google Search does not use them. They do no harm either and can help other AI services. That is why they are part of every Catinity site, without us promising you Google rankings for them.
• Artificially chopping texts into chunks: write for people. A clear outline is enough.
• Bought mentions: fake recommendations on the web help less than it seems and can be treated as spam.

Your checklist

1. Does every page state clearly what you offer, for whom and where?
2. Is there a sitemap, and is the site registered in Google Search Console?
3. Is the text in the delivered HTML?
4. Is there structured data for company, services and frequently asked questions?
5. Does the page meet the Core Web Vitals?
6. Is your Google Business Profile complete and current?

If you are unsure about more than one point, our website check tests the technical basics for you. What a new site costs and what it costs to run afterwards is in What does a website really cost? .