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Your customers ask ChatGPT now. Does it know your business?

Fewer people click through to websites when AI answers the question for them. Here is what that means for a small company — and five things to fix this month.

By Peter Fülep · · 6 min read

When someone types "good electrician near Rosenheim" or "accounting software for a 20-person company" today, a growing share of them get an answer written by AI before they see a single link. If your business isn't in that answer, it doesn't matter how good your website looks.

The click is shrinking

Pew Research Center tracked the real browsing of 900 US adults. When Google showed an AI summary, people clicked a traditional search result in 8% of visits — versus 15% when there was no summary. Clicks on the sources inside the summary itself happened in just 1% of visits.

That is the shift in one number: being ranked is no longer enough. You need to be cited.

The good news: it's not a separate universe

Generative engine optimization (GEO) sounds like a whole new discipline. It mostly isn't. An Ahrefs analysis of 1.4 million prompts found that around 88% of the URLs ChatGPT cites come from its ordinary web search retrieval. In other words, ChatGPT finds its sources largely the same way a search engine does. Classic SEO basics still carry most of the weight.

What changes is how your content has to be written so a machine can lift it into an answer.

What actually moves the needle

The most cited controlled study here is GEO-BENCH (Aggarwal et al., 2024). Adding statistics, quotations and cited sources to content improved visibility in generative engines by up to around 40%. Keyword stuffing, on the other hand, performed worse than doing nothing on Perplexity.

A second pattern: an analysis by Kevin Indig found that 44% of ChatGPT citations come from the first 30% of a page. AI reads the top of your page much more than the bottom.

Five things to fix this month

  1. Say what you do in the first sentence of every page. "We install heat pumps for homes in the Chiemgau region" beats "Welcome to our website".
  2. Put numbers on your claims. Years in business, number of projects, response time, prices. Specific facts get quoted; vague ones get skipped.
  3. Answer the questions your customers really ask — in their words, on your own site. One clear question, one direct answer.
  4. Get mentioned elsewhere. Industry directories, local press, partner pages, review platforms. AI trusts what others say about you more than what you say about yourself.
  5. Keep your basics clean. Name, address, opening hours and services identical everywhere — website, Google Business Profile, directories.

Being ranked is no longer enough. You need to be cited.

How to check where you stand

Open ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google, and ask the three questions a new customer would ask before finding you. Write down who gets named. If it's your competitors, you now know what this project is worth.

If you want a structured version of that check — and a fix list ranked by effort — that's part of my automation audit.

Sources

  1. Pew Research Center — Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears (July 2025)
  2. Aggarwal et al. — GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (KDD 2024, arXiv 2311.09735)
  3. Elite Content Marketer — 94 GEO statistics with primary sources (Ahrefs, Kevin Indig), 2026

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