AI search is quietly changing how people find businesses, here's what I learned about getting cited
Hey Founders, first time posting to reddit. So I'm gonna say Hi to everyone :)
*(Disclosure up front: I work in this space, posting purely because I think it's underrated, not selling anything.)*
I've been going down a rabbit hole on something most people aren't paying attention to yet: not ranking on Google, but getting *cited inside AI answers* (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews).
More people are asking AI "who's a good X for Y?" instead of scrolling search results. If your business never shows up in that answer, you're invisible to a growing chunk of buyers — and it doesn't show in your analytics, so most people don't realize it's happening.
I ran \~20 small-business sites through a few AI tools to see how often they got pulled in as a source. Most scored basically 0% not because the content was bad, but because it wasn't structured the way AI extracts and quotes info.
A few things that actually matter:
- AI loves clean, answerable blocks. A clear question → a tight, self-contained answer gets quoted way more than long meandering paragraphs.
- Entity authority is real. Pages with a named author + consistent identity get trusted more than anonymous "our team" copy.
- Most tools just show a score but don't fix anything. The score is the easy part; the work is rewriting the pages.
Curious if others here have noticed their site showing up (or not) in AI answers and how you're thinking about it.