What ChatGPT, Perplexity and other assistants say about local businesses, how that is measured, and what changes it. Based on dated measurements.
There is no fixed answer to look up: an assistant writes what it says about your business each time, out of what it can find about you on the web and on your Business Profile. The only way to know what yours says is to ask it and read what comes back.
Not by itself. Google’s documentation judges the purpose rather than the tool: using automation, including AI generation, to produce content for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings is a violation of its spam policies, and generating many pages without adding value is named as scaled content abuse.
They are ordinary search work sold under a new name. Google has no page defining generative engine optimization, and the closest its documentation comes is listing optimizing for generative AI among the things an SEO may offer, alongside content, technical advice and keyword research.
It matters because the answer is increasingly written out rather than listed, and because a wrong fact about your business is then repeated in confident full sentences. It is not a separate service though: Google says optimizing for generative AI search is still SEO, and Search Console now reports how often your links appear.
There is no separate method: Google states there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary. Do the ordinary things, allow crawling, keep important content in text, make the pages worth reading, and keep your Business Profile facts correct.
Google says there is nothing special to do. Its page on AI features states that there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary, and that a page only has to be indexed and eligible to be shown with a snippet.
You can measure your visibility in Google’s own AI features, and very little else. Search Console has a Generative AI performance report that counts impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode, and Google says AI traffic is also included in the overall search traffic in the Performance report.
You cannot buy a place in a ChatGPT answer: OpenAI says its search ranks results using multiple factors and that placement is not guaranteed. What you can do is documented and short, which is to let its search crawler reach your site, keep your pages indexable and worth quoting, and keep your business details correct.
Answer engine optimization works in two steps that you can act on separately: a system retrieves pages from a search index, then writes an answer from what it retrieved and shows links to it. So the work is getting your pages retrievable and worth quoting, and Google says that is still ordinary SEO.
It is not a different craft. Google’s guide says that optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO; what changes is where the answer appears, how many searches your page is pulled into, and that Search Console now counts it separately.