If you’ve searched for “how to show up in AI search results” lately, you’re not alone: business owners are starting to notice that tools like ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, and Perplexity answer local questions by citing a handful of sources, and their own website often isn’t one of them. Two pieces published this month lay out why that happens and what a service business can actually do about it.
AI engines pick citations, not just rankings
A piece in Search Engine Journal walks through how to audit which sources an AI engine is already pulling from for your industry: mapping citations by engine, spotting which competitors keep showing up, and turning that into a list of content and outreach priorities. The underlying point matters more than the audit method: AI answers draw from a narrower, more specific set of sources than a traditional search results page. Ranking well in Google doesn’t automatically mean an AI assistant will mention you when someone asks it a question in your category.
For a plumber, dentist, or HVAC company, that means the relevant question isn’t just “do we rank” but “are we one of the handful of sources an AI system trusts enough to name.” Those aren’t the same fight.
What makes a local page citable
The second piece, also from Search Engine Journal, gets more specific about local service pages themselves. The core claim: AI systems rank passages of text rather than whole pages, they read alt text on images, and they cite whatever numbers you actually publish on the page. If your pricing, service area, hours, or specifications live only in a PDF, a phone call, or a quote form, an AI system has nothing to cite, so it won’t cite you.
That has a few practical implications for how a local page should be built:
- Put concrete facts in plain text on the page itself (service area by city or zip, price ranges, turnaround times, licensing or certification numbers), not buried in images or downloadable brochures.
- Write in clear, self-contained passages rather than long unbroken paragraphs. If an AI system is going to lift one chunk of text to answer a question, that chunk needs to make sense on its own.
- Use real alt text on photos of your team, vehicles, or completed jobs, since that text is also part of what gets read.
What to actually do this week
Neither piece is telling businesses to abandon normal SEO or rebuild a website from scratch. The realistic takeaway is smaller and more specific:
- Open your own local service pages and check whether the basic facts (service area, pricing range, hours, credentials) are visible as plain text, not just implied or hidden behind a