For years, businesses have worried about what appears when someone Googles their name. They’ve invested in SEO, carefully written their websites, built up positive reviews and tried to make sure that journalists and trade publications are saying the right things about them.
But there’s a new question every business needs to start asking: What does AI say about you when you’re not in the room?
It’s a major concern so in this blog we look at the issues, and we suggest some action points to help you get to grips with it.
Search has changed – but who is in control?
For a few months every new or ambitious client has asked us, “how to we make our website appear on AI searches?”. Valid question, which is called GEO AI optimisation, and we’re helping them achieve it. But there is a less common question.
Your next customer may not Google you at all, and go straight toChatGPT, Gemini or Google AI Mode to ask a question about their problem — and make a judgement based on the answer they receive. And you won’t be there to correct the record.
The conversation is happening without you
Traditional search gave people a list of sources to choose from. AI search increasingly gives them an answer.
Google’s AI Mode has now passed one billion monthly active users globally, with queries more than doubling every quarter since launch. Meanwhile, ChatGPT Search can trawl the web and provide answers with links to sources, may of which are not as reliable as you may hope. People’s views on sources like Reddit carry much weight on AI scans.
The shift might sound subtle, but commercially it’s significant – and not just for big business. We have plenty of SMEs as clients who have had control taken away.
Imagine a prospective customer asking:
“Who are the leading suppliers of [your product or service] in the UK?”
“What should I look for when choosing a [your type of supplier]?”
“What are the alternatives to [competitor]?”
They may never see your carefully optimised homepage. They may instead see an AI-generated answer that mentions three competitors, cites a trade publication, draws on customer reviews — and doesn’t mention you at all.
You haven’t lost a search ranking. You’ve lost the conversation entirely.
Action point 1: Ask AI the types of questions you want to be the top result for. What is it saying, who is promoting ahead of you, and what is it getting wrong? And don’t limit it to one AI. Try them all, log the results and build an action plan. [We can help you, of course].
To help you, perhaps choose ten questions that a potential customer might ask before buying from you. Not questions about your brand name — questions about the problem you solve.
For example:
- Who are the leading [type of company] in the UK?
- What should I look for when choosing a [supplier/service]?
- What are the best [products/services] for [specific situation]?
- Who provides [specialist service] in [location]?
- What are the main challenges facing [your sector]?
- What are the alternatives to [competitor]?
- Which companies specialise in [your area of expertise]?
Put those questions into ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Mode. Then look at the answers.
Don’t just ask whether you appear. Ask:
- Are we represented accurately if at all?
- Are our competitors appearing instead?
- Which sources are being cited?
- What does the answer suggest we’re known for?
- Is anything important missing?
- Is any of the information wrong or out of date?
That last question may be the most important.
You can’t sit in on every meeting – but AI can
So what makes appealing to AI different from traditional SEO? An AI system doesn’t experience your brand the way a human does. It doesn’t attend your conference, read your beautifully designed brochure or sit through your latest project.
It draws on information available to it: your website, news coverage, trade publications, reviews, directories, LinkedIn, forums, community discussions and other third-party sources. And it tries to assemble those fragments into an answer. What happens when the story the internet tells about your business is different from the story you tell about yourself? That’s the bit you can’t control directly. It’s an issue that’s hyper-local that can affect even the smallest of businesses.
Your brand now has an audience you can’t speak to. AI is forming an opinion about your company based on evidence you may not have thought about in years — or ever.
The problem isn’t just being invisible – it’s about what’s visible
This is the really tricky bit. It’s tempting to think this is simply the next version of SEO. Optimise your website for AI and you’re sorted. But that’s only part of the story.
The more serious issue is accuracy. Recent reporting has highlighted cases where AI-generated search summaries have confused businesses, relied on outdated information or presented misleading claims. Even now in August 2026 my free version of ChatGPT thinks it’s living in 2025!
Research published this month found that AI recommendation systems can struggle with a very practical problem: staleness. In an audit of more than 4,700 restaurants, cafés and bars, researchers found that AI systems sometimes recommended businesses that had permanently closed.
You don’t need to be a restaurant for the lesson to apply.
If your company changed its name three years ago, acquired another business, discontinued a product, moved premises or changed its positioning — what happens if old information is still circulating across the web? AI doesn’t know which version of your company is correct unless the evidence makes that clear.
Action point 2: Audit your website and find information that’s out of date, incorrect or misrepresents where you are now. Log it page by page so you have a to-do list.See the list below for some ideas.
Your website has a new job
This doesn’t mean your website has become irrelevant. In fact, the opposite may be true.
Google’s current guidance says that the fundamentals of good SEO remain important for appearing in AI Overviews and AI Mode. OpenAI similarly says that public websites can appear in ChatGPT Search and provides guidance on making content discoverable. But your website isn’t simply a digital brochure anymore. It’s part of the information infrastructure around your company.
That makes some relatively unglamorous things much more important:
- Is your company description accurate?
- Are your products and services clearly explained?
- Are your locations and contact details consistent?
- Are old pages still publishing information that’s no longer true?
- Are your senior people correctly identified?
- Do you explain the specialist subjects on which you want to be considered an authority?
- Are important claims supported by evidence?
These are communications questions as much as technical ones. By way of example, we’ve taken on a new software client called Measure2Improve. The first thing we did when we rebuilt their website was rewrite ALL of their blogs. While these blogs only went back to 2024, they were loaded with information about their products and business that had been superseded. It was vital we brought them up to date. And how many old blogs do you have on your website? Blogs wishing people a happy Christmas 2022; welcoming a staff member who left a couple of years later; or talking about old premises, in an old location? I’ll tell you – too many! And they’re often the main culprit for misinformation.
Action point 3: Amend blogs, bring them up to date, review keywords. Think about cornerstone content and how your blogs can be better structured, and interlink with other content. [We can help you, of course].
And is this where PR suddenly matters again?
There’s an interesting irony here. For years, digital marketing and PR have sometimes been treated as separate disciplines. But AI search is beginning to bring them back together.
If an AI system is trying to establish whether your company is credible, authoritative or a leader in a particular field, a claim on your own website is only one piece of the puzzle. Independent coverage matters. Expert commentary matters. Trade publications matter. Reviews and customer experiences matter. Consistent information across multiple credible sources matters.
Research from WE Communications and USC Annenberg found that 62% of communicators see ‘generative engine optimisation’ (GEO – the new AI name for SEO) as a major opportunity — but only 23% currently track how often their brands appear in AI results. Smaller companies can be forgiven for this, but big companies need a slap on the wrist!
This isn’t about getting an AI to “like” your website. It’s about earning enough authority across the wider information ecosystem that AI has good reasons to represent you accurately.
How do we optimise for ChatGPT?
There’s no magic piece of code that guarantees a favourable AI answer. The real challenge is broader: build an organisation that’s easy to understand, easy to verify and worth talking about.
There’s an important warning here. The temptation will be to treat AI visibility like the early days of SEO: find the algorithmic trick, manufacture mentions and optimise everything to death. This is probably why you have dozens of worthless blogs already! They once helped with SEO, and now they hinder AI.
We’ve already seen evidence of marketers trying to manipulate AI recommendations by seeding brand mentions into online communities. Reporting on Reddit describes brands and agencies attempting to influence AI results through supposedly organic discussions — prompting moderators to step up efforts against covert promotion.
The better strategy is almost the opposite. Give the machine better evidence. Publish genuinely useful information. Demonstrate expertise. Get credible people talking about your organisation. Make your facts consistent. Correct outdated information. Answer the questions customers actually ask. And give people — and the systems learning from them — something worth believing.
We’ve given a number of presentations to clients recently about how to “do” GEO. Our answer is:
- Build a website that great for a human – with good, up-to-date content and the facts to prove your claims.
- Build a website that’s optimised for Google, so has good semantic structure, tags and URLs.
- Then think about GEO – and the questions people ask. Consider how your website, alongside information on other sites and sources answers these questions.
The question for your next marketing meeting
The next phase of search isn’t simply about whether your website ranks. It’s about whether your business is present in the answer. And that answer might be generated before a prospective customer ever visits your website.
So perhaps the question for your next meeting shouldn’t be: “Where do we rank on Google?” but rather this:
Action point 4: Ask “If our ideal customer asked AI about our market today, what would it say about us — when we’re not in the room?”
And if you don’t know the answer, that’s probably the first thing worth finding out.
How we can help
At Oxygen, we are helping businesses understand how they’re represented across AI search — and what to do about it. That includes auditing your AI visibility, improving your website’s usefulness as a source of truth, strengthening your authority through PR and content, and making sure the information ecosystem around your brand actually reflects who you are.
If you’d like to talk about what AI is saying about your company, get in touch.