How much does it matter which search engine ChatGPT uses?

Ask anywhere public why ChatGPT never mentions your business and within about three replies somebody will tell you that ChatGPT does not use Google, it uses Bing, so you should go and rank on Bing. It sounds like inside knowledge, it is delivered with real confidence, and it will send you off for a fortnight on a job that does not fix what you came to fix.

Where the advice came from

It was not invented out of nothing. There was a period when the web-browsing part of one assistant did lean on one particular search index, that got written about widely at the time, and the sentence entered circulation. It has been repeated ever since, long after the thing it described stopped being a settled fact.

Which index sits behind which assistant is a commercial arrangement between two companies, and commercial arrangements get renegotiated. Any advice that names one search engine as the answer has a short shelf life, and you will not be told when it expires. That alone is reason enough to be careful with it, before you even get to whether it works.

The deeper reason it misses

Suppose the advice is exactly right today. It still solves the wrong half of the problem, because ranking gets your page in front of the system and does nothing to make that page useful once it arrives.

Whatever reaches your page still has to find something inside it that can be repeated: that you cover this town, that you take on this kind of job, that you are open on Saturday. If the page is three hundred words about quality and trust, being found changes nothing at all. Which is why owners who rank first are still missing from the answer, and there are a lot of them.

What the search engine says about itself

On its own AI answers, Google is unusually blunt:

There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary.

Being found by search in the normal way is the whole requirement. That is a disappointment if you were hoping for a lever to pull, and it should also be a relief, because the money being asked for secret techniques is buying something the platform itself says does not exist.

It is worth being fair about the limits of that quote. It covers Google's features and says nothing about how ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity choose what to say, and those companies publish nothing equivalent. So nobody can hand you a documented method for those, us included.

The salvageable part of the advice

There is something worth keeping in it. Make sure anything that looks you up can actually reach you and read you, which is an hour of work rather than a fortnight. Check you are not accidentally blocking anything, check that your prices and hours are written as text rather than sitting inside a picture, and check your business appears where it should.

Then spend the rest of that fortnight on the part nobody mentions, which is writing down what you do, where you work, when you are open and what it costs. It is duller than a ranking tactic and it is the only part of this you fully control.

Sources

• Google Search Central, AI features and your website — requirements for appearing in AI Overviews and AI Mode.

Written by the team at hailera — we help small businesses answer customer questions without being there.