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A companion to A Practical Guide to SEO. Read that one first — most of what makes a site work for Google also makes it work for ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity. This note covers what's genuinely new, and — just as importantly — what hasn't really changed.

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In the last year or so, more clients have started asking a version of the same question: will the new site be found in ChatGPT and the other AI tools, as well as on Google?

The answer has two halves: a strategic half, which matters more, and a technical half, which is more reassuring than people expect.

The strategic half: why do you actually want SEO?

Before worrying about which engine is finding your site — Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity, whatever's next — it's worth pausing on a more basic question: where does your business actually come from?

There are broadly two kinds of websites:

• Discovery sites rely on search to bring in new business. People type a query, click a result, become a customer. This is most e-commerce, most lead-generation services, comparison sites, B2C software — and holiday lettings and direct-booking travel, where people genuinely search for somewhere to stay.
• Validation sites sit at the end of a referral journey. Someone hears the name from a contact, Googles it to check it's real, and then decides whether to engage. This is most professional services — architecture practices, engineers, consultancies, law firms, agencies.

Some businesses sit across both. A villa rental company, for instance, is found through search by some guests and arrives by personal recommendation for others — so the site has to do both jobs: rank and convert for the searchers, reassure and convert for the referred.

For validation businesses, the website's main job is credibility on landing, not ranking in results. Whether you appear at #1 for a generic industry term matters far less than whether the site looks credible, loads fast, shows the right work, and makes the next conversation easy when someone is already on the page.

The same logic applies to AI search. The relevant question isn't "will we be cited in ChatGPT?" — it's "when someone asks ChatGPT about us specifically, does it answer correctly and well?" That's a much more achievable goal, and a much more honest one.

So before going further, it's worth asking:

1. Where does new business currently come from? Referrals and reputation, or search and ads?
2. Has anyone ever come through a Google search and become a client?
3. What would "showing up in ChatGPT" actually achieve for you, in business terms?

If the honest answer to (1) is "referrals, awards, press, repeat clients", then both SEO and AI search are defensive activities — making sure the right things happen when someone looks you up. They're not your growth lever, and no amount of optimisation will change that.

The technical half: most of it is the same as good SEO

The technical foundations for AI search are almost identical to the foundations for traditional SEO. The same things that help Google understand your site help ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity understand it too:

• Clean, semantic HTML with proper heading structure (H1 / H2 / H3)
• Content that's actually in the page when it loads, not built by JavaScript after the fact