When someone asks ChatGPT “what’s a good tool for invoice automation?” or Perplexity “best running sunglasses in Australia,” those engines don’t pull from a paid directory. They synthesize answers from whatever they’ve crawled, indexed, and deemed trustworthy. The brands that show up earned their way there.
Understanding what these engines look for is the first step to appearing in their answers.
AI engines read your site differently than humans do
Google’s traditional crawler cares about keywords, backlinks, and page speed. AI engines care about those too, but they also parse meaning. They pull structured data from your schema markup, read your content for topical depth, and cross-reference what other sites say about you.
Three signals matter most:
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Structured data (schema markup). JSON-LD schema tells AI engines exactly what your business does, what you sell, and how to categorize you. Without it, engines have to guess. A product page with proper Product schema, including price, availability, and review ratings, gives an AI engine concrete facts to cite. A page without schema is just paragraphs to parse.
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Topical authority across multiple pages. One blog post about running sunglasses won’t get you cited. Ten pages covering lens technology, fit guides, anti-fog coatings, and race-day gear tells an AI engine you know the category. These engines look for clusters of related content, not isolated pages.
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Third-party mentions and editorial coverage. When other sites mention your brand in context (a comparison article, a roundup, a case study), AI engines treat that as validation. This is the digital equivalent of word-of-mouth, and it carries weight in AI-generated answers.
What most brands get wrong
The most common mistake is treating AI visibility as a separate channel. It is not. The same content that ranks on Google feeds ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. But the format matters more than you might expect.
AI engines favour content that answers specific questions directly. A page titled “Everything You Need to Know About X” often loses to a page that answers “How does X compare to Y?” with concrete details. The second page gives the engine a clear, citable answer. The first gives it a wall of text to sift through.
Pricing pages are another blind spot. Many brands hide pricing behind “contact us” forms. AI engines can only cite what they can read. If your pricing is on the page with proper schema, it shows up in AI answers. If it is behind a form, it does not exist to these engines.
The role of AI in reshaping the customer journey
This shift matters because the customer journey itself is changing. Buyers increasingly start with an AI query instead of a Google search. They ask conversational questions and expect direct answers with brand names attached.
EitBiz explored a related angle in their coverage of how AI is driving better customer experience in ecommerce, noting that more than 80% of organizations now consider customer experience the deciding factor in business success. When the discovery layer shifts to AI, the brands that show up in those initial answers shape the entire downstream experience.
A practical starting point
If you want to check where you stand, run a simple test. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google, then search for the queries your customers would use to find you. Note which brands appear. Note which ones don’t. That gap between who shows up and who should is your AI visibility gap.
From there, the work breaks into three categories:
- Fix your structured data. Add or clean up JSON-LD schema on your key pages. Product pages, service pages, and your homepage should all have proper Organization, Product, or Service schema.
- Build topical depth. Map the questions your customers ask and create content that answers each one specifically. Link those pages together so engines can follow the thread from broad topic to specific answer.
- Earn third-party mentions. Get your brand referenced in editorial content on other sites. Not paid placements or directory listings, but genuine mentions in articles where your brand belongs in the conversation.
None of this requires a massive budget or a dedicated SEO team. It requires knowing what AI engines look for and doing the work to provide it. The brands appearing in AI answers today started this work months ago. The ones that start now will be the brands appearing six months from now.