AI SEO: How to Get Your Business Cited by ChatGPT, Gemini & AI Overviews

Something has fundamentally shifted in how people find businesses. A growing number of potential customers never see a traditional search result — they ask ChatGPT for a recommendation, get an answer from Google's AI Overview, or use Perplexity to research a purchase. If your business isn't being cited in these AI responses, you're invisible to an increasingly large segment of your market.

This isn't theoretical. We manage SEO campaigns across 41 distinct Melbourne industry verticals — from dentists and legal firms to ecommerce stores and builders. Over the past twelve months, we've been systematically testing what actually gets businesses cited by AI platforms — and what turns out to be noise. This guide is the result of that work.

What Is AI SEO?

AI SEO — sometimes called Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) — is the practice of optimising your website and broader digital presence so that AI systems cite your business when users ask relevant questions. It's a layer built on top of traditional SEO, not a replacement for it.

The distinction matters. Traditional SEO gets you ranked in a list of ten blue links. AI SEO gets you named as a source inside the answer itself. When someone asks ChatGPT "what should I look for in a Melbourne family lawyer?" and the response cites your firm by name with a link to your website, that's AI SEO working.

The major platforms that matter right now are Google AI Overviews (integrated directly into the world's dominant search engine), ChatGPT (the most widely used standalone AI tool), Perplexity AI (growing rapidly among researchers and professionals), and Microsoft Copilot (reaching users through Bing and Microsoft 365 integration).

How AI Platforms Choose Which Businesses to Cite

Every AI platform has its own retrieval system, but they all draw on overlapping signals. After testing across our 41 industry verticals, we've identified the factors that consistently predict citation across all major platforms.

Entity Authority: The Foundation

AI systems don't think in terms of "websites" the way Google's traditional algorithm does. They think in terms of entities — recognised, distinct things in the world. Your business is an entity. So is your founder, your suburb, your industry category. The stronger your entity identity across the web, the more likely AI systems are to recognise and cite you.

Entity authority comes from consistency and breadth: your Google Business Profile, your Australian Business Register entry, your LinkedIn company page, your industry association memberships, your mentions in news publications and directories. Each of these reinforces the AI's confidence that your business is a real, established entity worth referencing.

For Melbourne businesses specifically, suburb-level entity signals are critical. When a user asks Perplexity "best physiotherapist in South Yarra," the AI draws on entity data that associates your practice with that specific suburb. If your Google Business Profile says South Yarra but your schema markup says Melbourne and your directory listing says Prahran, you've fragmented your entity identity across three different suburb signals.

Structured Data: Making Your Content Machine-Readable

Schema markup has always been useful for SEO. For AI SEO, it's closer to essential. Structured data gives AI systems pre-parsed, reliable information they can extract without having to interpret unstructured text. A page with LocalBusiness schema that explicitly states your service area, opening hours, and accepted payment methods is dramatically easier for an AI to cite accurately than a page where that same information is buried in paragraph text.

The schema types that matter most for AI visibility are LocalBusiness (or its subtypes like MedicalBusiness, LegalService, Restaurant), FAQPage on service pages, Article on editorial content, and Service for individual service offerings. For ecommerce, Product and AggregateRating schema are similarly important — see our Melbourne ecommerce SEO guide for the full technical breakdown.

Content Structure: Write for Extraction, Not Just Reading

AI platforms cite content they can cleanly extract a useful answer from. This means your content needs to be structured so that each section functions as a self-contained, citable unit. Use H2 headings that mirror the questions your customers actually ask. Open each section with a direct, concise answer in the first one to two sentences. Then expand with supporting detail, evidence, and examples.

Think of each H2 section as a standalone answer card. If Google's AI Overview pulled just that section out of your page and presented it as an answer, would it make sense on its own? Would it be accurate, complete, and useful? If yes, you've structured it correctly.

What We Found Across 41 Melbourne Industries

Not all industries are affected equally by AI search. Our testing revealed clear patterns in which sectors are seeing the most AI-mediated traffic and where the biggest opportunities lie.

High-Consideration Services Lead the Shift

Industries where customers do significant research before making a decision are seeing the fastest growth in AI-mediated queries. Medical practices, psychologists, financial planners, and legal firms are particularly affected because users are increasingly asking AI platforms questions like "what should I look for in a family lawyer?" or "how do I choose a psychologist in Melbourne?" before they even search Google.

For these industries, being cited in the AI response is the new equivalent of ranking on page one. The AI's recommendation carries significant weight because users trust these platforms as impartial advisors — arguably more than they trust the top-ranked Google result, which they know could be there because of advertising or aggressive SEO.

Local Services: Suburb-Level Data Wins

For trades and local services — plumbers, roofers, mechanics, cleaners — AI visibility is heavily influenced by suburb-level entity signals. Businesses with consistent suburb associations across their Google Business Profile, website schema, and directory listings significantly outperform competitors who only target "Melbourne" as a location.

The pattern is clear: when a user asks an AI platform "emergency plumber near Collingwood," the AI draws on structured geographic data, not just keyword matching. Your GBP listing, schema service area, and directory suburb tags all feed this signal.

Ecommerce: Product Schema Is the Differentiator

For Melbourne ecommerce businesses, AI visibility is increasingly tied to product-level structured data. Stores with comprehensive Product schema (including price, availability, shipping details, and aggregate ratings) are being cited in AI shopping recommendations at significantly higher rates than stores without this markup — even when the stores without schema have stronger traditional SEO metrics.

B2B and Niche Industries: Low Volume, High Value

Some of the most valuable AI SEO opportunities sit in industries with small search volumes but enormous deal sizes. Mining services, SaaS companies, and IT services firms may only get a handful of AI-mediated queries per month, but each citation could lead to a contract worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. In these sectors, the ROI on AI SEO is potentially the highest of any channel.

The AI SEO Framework: What to Implement and in What Order

Based on our testing, here's the implementation sequence that produces results most efficiently. We've ordered these by impact-to-effort ratio — the first items deliver the most AI visibility improvement for the least implementation cost.

1. Lock Down Your Entity Signals (Week 1–2)

Audit and unify your business information across every platform. Your Google Business Profile, ABN registration, LinkedIn, industry directories, and website should all contain identical business name, address, phone number, and service descriptions. For Melbourne businesses, ensure your suburb associations are consistent — pick your primary suburb and use it everywhere.

Claim or create listings on the directories that AI systems are known to reference: Google Business Profile (critical), LinkedIn Company Page, True Local, Yellow Pages, your relevant industry association (Law Society of NSW, RACGP, Master Builders Victoria, etc.), and any niche directories for your sector. Each listing reinforces your entity identity.

2. Implement Comprehensive Schema Markup (Week 2–4)

Add structured data to every key page on your site. The minimum viable schema stack for AI visibility includes:

• LocalBusiness (or industry subtype) on your homepage and contact page — with full address, opening hours, service area, phone, and accepted payment methods.
• FAQPage schema on service pages — using the actual questions your customers ask, with direct answers.
• Article schema on editorial/blog content — with author, publication date, and modification date.
• BreadcrumbList on all pages — helps AI systems understand your site's topical hierarchy.
• Service schema for individual service offerings — especially if you serve multiple suburbs or specialisations.

Validate all schema using Google's Rich Results Test and Schema.org's validator. Broken or incomplete schema is worse than no schema — it signals carelessness to AI systems that are evaluating your site's reliability.

3. Restructure Your Core Content (Month 2)

Take your five most commercially important pages and rewrite them with AI extraction in mind. For each page, use H2 headings that match the questions users ask AI platforms. Open each section with a direct, one-to-two sentence answer. Follow with evidence, examples, and supporting detail. Include specific data points and named entities (suburbs, institutions, regulatory bodies) rather than vague generalisations.

For a Melbourne accounting firm, this might mean restructuring your tax services page so that the H2 reads "How Much Does a Tax Accountant Cost in Melbourne?" with the first sentence directly stating a price range — because that's exactly the kind of question users are asking ChatGPT, and that's the format the AI needs to cite you as a source.

4. Build Content Clusters That Demonstrate Expertise (Month 2–4)

AI platforms strongly favour websites that demonstrate deep topical authority. A single service page tells AI that you offer a service. A cluster of ten interlinked pages — covering the service, its subtypes, pricing, process, FAQs, case studies, and location-specific information — tells AI that you're an authority on the topic.

This is where our 41 industry-specific SEO guides for Melbourne businesses provide a practical model. Each guide covers an entire vertical's SEO landscape in depth — from keyword strategy to technical implementation to local optimisation. That depth of coverage is what earns citations across multiple AI-generated responses for related queries.

5. Create an llms.txt File (Week 1 — Quick Win)

An llms.txt file is a machine-readable document placed at your website's root (e.g., yoursite.com.au/llms.txt) that tells AI systems what your business is, what you do, and which content is most authoritative. While not an official standard, it's a growing convention that forward-thinking businesses are adopting.

Include your business name, location, service area, a concise expertise description, and links to your most important content pages. Think of it as a structured introduction that helps AI systems understand and accurately represent your business — similar to how robots.txt guides traditional crawlers.

6. Monitor, Update, and Compound (Ongoing)

AI SEO isn't a set-and-forget exercise. Test your visibility quarterly by querying ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google with the prompts your target customers would use. Screenshot the results. Track which competitors are being cited and what content they're being cited for. Use Google Search Console to monitor CTR changes on queries where AI Overviews appear.

Update your most important content pages at least quarterly. AI systems notice freshness signals — a page updated this month carries more weight than one last touched in 2023. Add a visible "Last updated" date to signal currency to both users and AI crawlers.

AI SEO vs. Traditional SEO: What Changes, What Stays

The critical point: AI SEO doesn't replace traditional SEO — it's built on the same foundation. A business with strong technical health, quality backlinks, and well-structured content will always outperform a competitor trying to shortcut straight to AI optimisation. Think of traditional SEO as the infrastructure and AI SEO as the additional strategy layer that captures the growing share of AI-mediated traffic.

Common AI SEO Mistakes Melbourne Businesses Make

Ignoring AI search entirely. The most common mistake is treating AI search as a future concern rather than a present reality. AI Overviews are already appearing for a significant share of Google queries in Australia. Businesses that wait to optimise will find their competitors have already established citation momentum that's difficult to displace.

Optimising for AI but neglecting traditional SEO. Some businesses hear about AI SEO and leap straight into schema markup and llms.txt files while their website has broken internal links, missing title tags, and no backlink strategy. AI platforms still heavily weight traditional authority signals. Fix the fundamentals first.

Inconsistent entity data. Using different business names, addresses, or phone numbers across your website, GBP listing, and directories fragments your entity identity. AI systems lose confidence in who you are and cite competitors with cleaner entity profiles instead.

Thin content masquerading as authority. Publishing 20 short blog posts on loosely related topics doesn't build topical authority. One deeply comprehensive, well-structured guide on a core topic — supported by detailed subpages — outperforms a volume approach every time for AI citation.

Forgetting to update. AI systems have started checking content freshness more aggressively. A page last updated in 2022 won't be cited over a competitor's page updated last month, even if your page has stronger backlinks. Set a quarterly review cycle for your most important content.

Industry-Specific AI SEO: Where to Start for Your Sector

Every industry has different AI citation dynamics. Here are direct links to our industry-specific Melbourne SEO guides, each of which covers the AI optimisation tactics most relevant to that sector: