Two ways to answer: memory or live search
An AI assistant can answer in two ways. From memory: the language model was trained on text from the web and therefore knows many businesses. But this knowledge has a cut-off date and can be outdated or incomplete.
With live search: the assistant runs one or more searches itself, fetches suitable pages and writes its answer from them, usually with links to the sources. OpenAI describes it this way for ChatGPT: the question is turned into search queries, the results are read, and the answer cites its sources. For questions like “Which tax advisor in Graz works with doctors?”, live search is the normal case.
What the providers themselves say
- OpenAI (ChatGPT): for search, OpenAI uses its own crawler called OAI-SearchBot. Sites that block it in robots.txt do not appear in ChatGPT’s search answers.
- Google (AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini): Google names no additional requirements. A page must be indexed in Google Search and eligible to be shown with a snippet. To answer, Google issues several related searches on subtopics (“query fan-out”).
- Microsoft (Copilot): answers that use the web are grounded in Bing search results and link to the pages used.
- Perplexity and Anthropic (Claude): both run their own search crawlers (PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot) and fetches on behalf of users (Perplexity-User, Claude-User).
What they all have in common: an assistant can only name what it finds and understands. None of the providers discloses exactly how it chooses between several suitable businesses.
What we observe in our measurements
The following points are our own observations from the AI Visibility Check, not official rules:
- Assistants cite not only company websites but also directories, review portals, chamber and authority websites and app stores. What these say about you feeds into the answer.
- Similar names get mixed up. We have seen an assistant treat one offer as another with a similar name.
- The same question can get a different answer minutes later. A single answer is a sample, not a ranking.
- New websites often only show up in AI answers once search engines have picked them up. That takes days to weeks.
What you can influence
These factors help decide whether an assistant can find you and place you correctly:
- Be reachable: do not lock out search crawlers – neither in robots.txt nor through your host’s bot protection. More in the guide on hosting pitfalls.
- Be unambiguous: write company name, address and phone the same way everywhere – on the website and in profiles and directories.
- Be specific: name focus areas, client groups and places clearly. “Tax advice for dental practices in Graz” helps more than “comprehensive advice”.
- Answer questions: answer the questions your clients really ask directly on your website – with one page per main service.
- Be machine-readable: structured data based on schema.org that matches the visible text exactly. See llms.txt, robots.txt and structured data.
- Get found: register your website with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. See why Bing matters.
What nobody can do
Nobody can promise that an AI assistant will name your business, or name it first – including us. And a mention is not yet an enquiry. The serious approach: improve the conditions and measure again with the same questions to see whether anything changes. How we do that is explained under How we measure.
Which of this applies to your business is what we check concretely in the AI Visibility Check: on your website, with your clients’ questions and compared with your competitors.