Most articles about AI search tell you what it is. Far fewer tell you what to actually do on Monday morning. If you have read the theory, understood that ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews are answering questions your customers used to type into a search box, and thought “fine — but where do I start?”, this is that article.
A strategy is not a list of tactics. It is a sequence, a timeframe, and a way of knowing whether it worked. What follows is a 90-day plan for a UK small or medium business doing this properly for the first time — and, just as importantly, the order to do it in.
of tracked Google queries returned an AI Overview by early 2026 — up from 31% a year earlier. The share of searches answered before anyone clicks is growing quickly.
The most common mistake is starting with content. It feels productive, and it is the part most businesses know how to do. But publishing excellent articles on a site that AI crawlers cannot read properly is like printing brochures and leaving them in a locked cupboard.
The order below runs foundations first, content second, corroboration third. Each phase makes the next one work harder. Reverse it and you will spend three months producing material that nothing can find.
Caz, Project Team Lead at Spiritus Design, says: “The order matters more than most businesses expect. We regularly see companies with genuinely good content that search engines and AI systems cannot read properly, and no amount of additional writing will fix a technical fault. Have the foundations checked before you commit to a content plan — it is a day of work that determines whether the next three months count for anything.”
Before changing anything, find out where you stand. Write down 15 to 20 questions a genuine customer might ask an AI assistant — not brand searches, but the real ones. “How much does an explainer video cost in the UK?” “Best animation studio for small business?” “How long should a marketing video be?”
Run each through ChatGPT and Perplexity. Record whether you appear, which competitors do, and what sources those answers cite. It takes an hour. Without it, you will have no idea in three months whether anything you did made a difference.
Then the unglamorous part. Check your robots.txt is not blocking crawlers. Confirm your pages return proper status codes. Add structured data — the Organization type on your homepage and the Article type on every piece of content. (Those are the literal schema names, which is why they carry a capital letter.) Make sure your site is quick on mobile.
None of this is visible to a customer. All of it determines whether your content can be used at all. Our guide on why websites fail to convert covers several of the same checks from a different angle.
Now content — but a specific kind. AI systems extract passages that answer a question cleanly and completely. That rewards a particular way of writing: the answer first, then the detail.
Take the questions from your baseline and answer them properly. Not marketing copy about how passionate you are — actual answers, with numbers where you have them. If a customer asks what something costs, publish what it costs. If they ask how long it takes, say how long it takes.
of Google searches now end without a click to any website. If your business is not named in the answer itself, that user may never know you exist.
That figure is the whole argument for this work. When roughly two thirds of searches end without anyone visiting a website, being named in the answer is the outcome. There is no second chance further down a results page.
This is the phase most businesses skip, and it is the one that separates a site that occasionally appears from a brand that reliably does.
AI systems do not evaluate you on your own website alone. They weigh what else on the internet says you exist and can be trusted. A business with excellent content and no external footprint looks, to a model, like a claim without a reference.
Practical steps, in rough order of value: a complete Google Business Profile, reviews on more than one platform, accurate directory listings, active social profiles linked from your site’s structured data, and video on YouTube — consistently among the most-cited domains across AI platforms.
A useful test: search your own business name and see what comes back besides your website. If the answer is “almost nothing”, that is your ceiling — and no amount of additional content on your own site will lift it.
Traditional SEO measures position. AI search has no position one, so it needs different instruments. Four are worth tracking:
You do not need software to start. Re-run your baseline questions once a month and record the answers in a spreadsheet. Dedicated tracking platforms exist and will automate this across several models at once, which is worth considering once your list of questions outgrows a spreadsheet. For a first pass, doing it by hand tells you everything you need.
Technical fixes show up within two to six weeks. Branded queries follow in one to three months. Broad category questions — the valuable ones — take six months or more, because they depend on corroboration that accumulates rather than anything you can switch on.
It is not a parallel discipline. Clear, well-structured, authoritative content serves both. Businesses that run them as two projects duplicate effort and usually do both badly. Our guide to AI search optimisation sets out where the two genuinely differ.
ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Copilot, Gemini. The techniques that work on one largely work on all, because they share the same underlying signals. Optimise for clarity and authority, not for a particular model’s quirks — which will change anyway.
If most AI sessions end without a click, judging this by sessions in your analytics will tell you it is failing when it is working. The return arrives as enquiries from people who already know who you are, and as prospects arriving further along than they used to.
For a small business with limited time, the highest-value actions are narrow. Publish honest answers to the five questions you get asked most, including the one about price. Complete a Google Business Profile. Make sure your site is technically readable.
That is a fortnight of work, not ninety days, and it will do more than most of what gets sold as an AI visibility package.
An AI search strategy is a plan for becoming visible in AI-generated answers from platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. It differs from a list of tactics by setting a sequence, a timeframe and a way of measuring progress. A typical first strategy runs over 90 days: establish a baseline, fix technical foundations, publish question-led content, then build third-party corroboration.
Technical fixes such as structured data and crawlability can show results within two to six weeks. Branded queries usually follow within one to three months. Consistent citation across broader category questions typically takes six months or more, because AI systems weight corroboration built up over time rather than recent changes.
There are four useful measures: mention frequency, how often your brand appears at all; citation rate, how often it is used as a source rather than named in passing; mention position, whether you appear first or last in a list; and share of voice against named competitors. Citations carry more weight than mentions, because they indicate the model treated your content as evidence.
No, though tools help at scale. A manual method works well for a small business: write down 15 to 20 questions a customer might ask, run them through ChatGPT and Perplexity once a month, and record whether you appear. Dedicated tracking platforms automate this across multiple models and are worth considering once your list of questions outgrows a spreadsheet.
Establish a baseline before changing anything, so you can tell later whether it worked. Then fix crawlability and structured data, because content cannot be cited if it cannot be read. Content and third-party presence come after that. Doing it in reverse is the most common and most expensive mistake.
We build the content that AI search actually cites — clear, structured, and written by people who know the subject. Tell us what you are trying to be found for.
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