AI SEO: How to Show Up When ChatGPT and Perplexity Answer Your Customers' Questions

The Search Engine Your Customers Aren't Telling You About

Here's a conversation that's happening right now, probably within a mile of your Erie business: someone picks up their phone, opens ChatGPT, and types "best plumber in Erie PA" or "who should I use for estate planning near me?" They get a confident, conversational answer. They call the recommended business. They never touch Google.

ChatGPT now processes over 2.5 billion queries per day and has 800 million weekly active users. Perplexity AI has grown to 45 million active users with 780 million queries in 2025. These aren't novelty numbers. This is a fundamental shift in how people find businesses.

The Datos/SparkToro State of Search Q4 2025 report tracked this precisely: AI tool usage nearly tripled year-over-year, growing from 0.24% to 0.77% of all US desktop activity. That might sound small, but context matters. That 0.77% represents tens of millions of queries per day. And here's the critical detail — people aren't replacing Google with ChatGPT. They're using both for different purposes. Google for navigational searches ("Amazon login"). AI for discovery and recommendation searches ("who's the best X in Y"). The discovery searches are exactly where local businesses win or lose.

The 58% Problem

Even on Google itself, the game has changed. Google's AI Overviews — those AI-generated summary boxes at the top of search results — now appear on approximately 16% of all queries. When they show up, the impact is severe.

Ahrefs' December 2025 study found that AI Overviews reduce clicks to the top-ranking organic result by 58%. Seer Interactive's September 2025 analysis was even more alarming: organic click-through rates dropped 61% on queries with AI Overviews, falling from 1.76% to 0.61%. Paid CTR crashed 68%.

But here's the flip side, and it's important: brands that are actually cited within AI Overviews earn 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks compared to when they're not cited. Being mentioned in the AI answer doesn't just maintain your traffic — it amplifies it.

So the question isn't whether AI is affecting your business. It's whether you're showing up in AI answers or getting buried by them.

How AI Decides What to Recommend

This isn't a black box. We know a lot about how LLMs choose which businesses and websites to cite, and the data is increasingly specific.

SE Ranking published a comprehensive study in late 2025 analyzing LLM citation behavior. Their findings:

• Sites with page load times under 0.4 seconds average 6.7 citations from ChatGPT. Sites loading over 1.13 seconds average 2.1. Fast pages get cited 3x more often.
• Domains with profiles on review platforms (Trustpilot, G2, Yelp, etc.) have 3x higher chances of being cited than sites without review presence.
• Sites with significant brand mentions on community platforms like Reddit and Quora have roughly 4x higher citation rates.

Semrush's AI citation study added another layer: Wikipedia is the most-cited source across almost every vertical, YouTube ranks second with 961,938 mentions, and Reddit commands 21% of all citations in Google AI Overviews specifically. Community-generated content gets cited more than polished marketing copy. AI models seem to prioritize what they perceive as unbiased, factual information over branded messaging.

For local businesses, this means your Google reviews, your community forum mentions, your local news features, and your structured website data collectively determine whether AI recommends you.

The Practical Playbook

What we implement for every Erie business we work with is specific and measurable. These aren't theoretical — they're the specific technical and content changes that move the needle on AI visibility.

Structured data that AI can parse instantly. JSON-LD schema markup for your specific business type — LocalBusiness, DentalPractice, LegalService, FinancialService, whatever matches. This includes your exact services, location coordinates, hours, accepted payments, credentials, and FAQ content. Research from data.world on Knowledge Graph-enhanced LLMs showed 3x accuracy improvements — from roughly 28% to 83% — when models had access to structured business data. That gap is the difference between AI confidently recommending your business and AI recommending someone else.

FAQ content written for AI extraction. When someone asks ChatGPT "how much does a dental implant cost in Erie?" or "what should I look for in a financial advisor?" — AI pulls answers from websites with FAQ schema that directly answers those questions. We identify the top 15-20 questions your customers actually ask and build dedicated content around each one, marked up with FAQPage schema so AI can extract and cite it directly.

Page speed as a citation factor. This one surprises people. SE Ranking's data showing 3x more citations for fast-loading pages means your site's performance directly affects whether AI recommends you. Not just Google rankings — AI recommendations. Our sites load in under 1 second. Most WordPress business sites in Erie take 4-8 seconds. That speed gap isn't just a user experience issue anymore. It's an AI visibility issue.

Review ecosystem cultivation. BrightLocal's 2025 data shows that AI chatbot usage for local business recommendations jumped from 6% to 45% in a single year. When AI recommends a business, it weighs review signals heavily. Not just your Google reviews — your presence across Yelp, industry-specific directories, and community platforms. Each review platform presence gives AI another signal that your business is real, active, and trusted.

Content depth over content volume. Semrush's research found that 97% of AI Overview citations come from pages already ranking well organically. You don't need to publish a blog post every week. You need 10-15 pages of genuinely useful, specific, locally-relevant content that answers real questions. Quality over quantity, always.

What This Looks Like in Revenue

Let's ground this in Erie-specific numbers. BrightLocal found that 45% of consumers have used AI for local business recommendations. Erie's metro area has roughly 270,000 people. If even 20% of working-age adults use AI for a local business search once per month, that's tens of thousands of AI-driven queries mentioning Erie businesses every month.

ChatGPT ecommerce traffic converts 31% higher than non-branded organic search, according to Similarweb's 2025 referral traffic analysis. The quality of AI-referred traffic is better than traditional search traffic because the user has already been "pre-sold" by the AI recommendation. They arrive with intent and trust already established.

For a business where a single customer is worth $3,000-$10,000+, capturing even a handful of AI-referred customers per month represents serious revenue. And because so few Erie businesses have done any AI optimization at all — we've checked — the first businesses to implement it will capture a wildly disproportionate share.

The Window Is Measured in Months, Not Years

SparkToro's Rand Fishkin has been tracking this shift for years. His 2024 zero-click search study with Datos found that 58.5% of US Google searches result in zero clicks — the user gets their answer without ever visiting a website. That number has only grown. Zero-click searches increased from 56% to 69% between May 2024 and May 2025.

This means optimizing your website for traditional search alone is a strategy with a shrinking ceiling. The businesses that will thrive are the ones visible across every surface where their customers look — Google organic, Map Pack, AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and whatever comes next.

We build every site at Stray Web Design to be visible across all of these surfaces. Structured data, semantic HTML, FAQ schema, fast loading, review integration — these aren't premium features. They're the baseline for being findable in 2026.

Those 2.5 billion daily ChatGPT queries we opened with? Each one is a conversation where a business either gets recommended or doesn't. The structured data, the fast load times, the review ecosystem, the citable content — they're not future-proofing. They're the infrastructure that determines whether your business participates in those conversations today. And today, in Erie, the answer for most businesses is no.